SUPRIM

SUPRIM stands for SUstainable management of PRIMary raw materials through a better approach in Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment. It is a 3 year-funded EIT Raw Materials Project that will offer solutions and services to address impacts of resource use in sustainability assessments in the raw materials sector. Sustainable management of raw materials through the product life cycles and the various value chains is now more than ever on the European agenda. This is largely due to misunderstandings about scarcity of metal and mineral resources within and outside of Europe.

Industries as well as academia are continuously trying to improve the methodology to assess the sustainability of products and their use of the materials they are made of.

One of the ways to assess this has been life cycle analysis and assessment. Not only should it allow assessing inputs and outputs in a transparent and scientific way, but it should allow communicating the results in a reasonably comprehensible way.

Natural resource availability, accessibility, exploration and extraction are starting concepts in this life cycle approach and are therefore key elements which need to be adequately understood and reflected in the overall analysis. This project is about enhancing the existing methodology and ensuring exactly that.

Objectives

• Develop a Life Cycle Impact Assessment method to address impacts of resource use in sustainability assessment.
• Develop specific Life Cycle Inventory datasets at two study sites in collaboration with the industrial partners from the mining sector.
• Bring the outcome of the project to the mining sector, policy makers, KIC partners, academic community and LCA community.

Expected outcome

The consortium will develop and validate a service, enabling stakeholders to integrate resource depletion in sustainability assessments, and thus assisting in the transition towards a more sustainable management of raw material extraction. The project will develop novel models for cause-and-effect chains enabling an accurate and accepted estimation of the impacts of resource depletion. To implement the methodology, appropriate LCI datasets are required, building on site-specific production data from existing mining operations. A transparent approach for the data collection, data quality assurance, and exploitation of a LCI database by a neutral and trustful body will be investigated.

Partners

• Ghent University, Belgium (Lead Partner)
• Luleå University of Technology (LTU), Sweden
• Leiden University, the Netherlands
• Boliden Mineral AB, Sweden
• COBRE LAS CRUCES, S.A., Spain
• Fundación Tecnalia Research & Innovation, Spain
• European Association of Mining Industries, Metal Ores & Industrial Minerals (EUROMINES), Belgium

Funding from EIT Raw Materials