REE in Historical Tailings (REEHT)

The EU is striving for a higher domestic production of Critical Raw Materials and Sweden has a great opportunity to be profiled as a world leading country regarding sustainable mining of REE.

But, the knowledge of REE geochemistry is limited, yet crucial, to decrease environmental impact from REE mining regarding mine waste and water management. Inaccurate methods can generate adverse impact on the environment and human health, and lead to expensive remediation costs. We want to make a pre-study of historical tailings enriched in REE to understand their geochemistry and mobility (REEHT). The outcomes of REEHT will be applied in future REE mining projects, to generate sustainable mining with low environmental footprint. The project will use a multi-disciplinary approach between ‘Applied Geochemistry’ and ‘Entrepreneurship and innovation’ and is expected to be the basis for common research projects in the future, together with companies such as LKAB, and in an ERA-MIN application.

Blog - Field work