In situ recovery of resources from waste repositories

拟议的研究旨在与学术界和工业界开展范围界定工作，以开发一个与垃圾填埋场采矿资源相关的新的令人兴奋的研究领域，旨在解决以下核心问题：资源（有价值的材料，如金属，稀土元素，塑料，能源）是否可以通过浸出废物储存库而回收，同时材料位于原地，从而避免需要积极开采材料？支撑这一点的基本地球科学研究问题是：我们如何理解和操纵处置库内废物的原位地球化学，以溶解资源并通过沥滤回收资源？原地浸出的概念和技术是在采矿业中开发出来的，用于回收铀和铜，并且通过循环溶液来提取元素和/或刺激和增强微生物浸出来完成。没有人研究过将这一概念应用于从废物储存库回收资源的可能性。废物的成分、矿物学和质地与矿石非常不同，因此需要新的科学来理解和开发溶出有价值成分的浸出方法。在范围界定阶段，我们将考虑目前在英国垃圾填埋场的所有废物的资源提取，包括工业和商业废物（预计富含金属）、焚化炉和燃料灰、矿物废物、城市废物和农业废物，以审查原地浸析的想法。我们特别希望在拨款期间，找出哪类堆填废物流的某些资源可能相对较丰富，并集中研究从这些废物中回收的全部建议。我们设想，原地浸出可以回避许多问题，防止实现前垃圾填埋场的资源潜力，不仅在英国，但国际上具有重要影响。此外，我们的目标不仅是研究通过原地浸出回收资源的方法，而且还研究如何适当地对此类过程进行基准测试（我们相信这将大大降低对环境和人类健康的影响），人类健康和生态系统服务成本与“传统”挖掘和垃圾填埋法开采和传统开采同样的资源。

The proposed research seeks to undertake scoping work with academia and industry to develop a new and exciting research field related to mining resources from landfill that seeks to address the following central question: Can resources (materials of value e.g. metals, rare earth elements, plastics, energy) be recovered by leaching waste repositories whilst the material lies in situ, thus avoiding the need to actively mine the material? The fundamental geoscience research question that underpins this is: How can we understand and manipulate the in situ biogeochemistry of the waste within the repository to solubilise resources and recover them through leaching?The concept and technology of in situ leaching has been developed in the mining industry for recovery of uranium and copper, and is done by circulating solutions to extract the elements and/or stimulating and enhancing microbial leaching. No-one has looked at the possibility of transfering this concept for application to recovery of resource from waste repositories. Wastes display diverse compositions, mineralogies, textures very different to that of ores and thus will require new science to understand and develop leaching methods to solubilise valuable components.We will during the scoping stage be considering resource extraction the full range of wastes currently in UK landfills including industrial snd commercial waste (anticipated to be metal-rich), incinerator and fuel ash, mineral wastes, municipal waste and agricultural wastes to examine the idea of in situ leaching. We are particulary keen to identify during the grant which types of landfilled waste streams might be relatively enriched in certain resources and focus the full research proposal on recovery from these wastes. We envisage that in situ leaching could sidestep many of the problems that prevent realisation of the resource potential of former landfill sites, with important impacts not only in the UK but internationally. Furthermore, our aim is to not only investigate means to recover resource through in situ leaching but to also investigate how we can appropriately benchmark such processes (which we believe will have substantially lower environmental and human health impacts) in terms of life-cycle, human health and ecosystems service costs for comparison to retrieval of landfilled resources by 'conventional' dig-and-process landfill mining and against conventional mining of the same resources.