November summary: a return to normality; encouraging news of young mineral processors

After three years in the doldrums it was great to be in Sitges, Spain, during the first week of the month, for Process Mineralogy '23, MEI's first face to face conference since Flotation '19 in Cape Town. Apart from getting back to proper social interaction, sadly lacking with online and hybrid conferences, it gave me, Amanda and Jon the opportunity of visiting Catalonia for the first time. Sitges certainly didn't disappoint, but I must confess to being slighly underwhelmed by nearby Barcelona.

Sitges and Barcelona

What I found particularly encouraging about Process Mineralogy '22 was the number of young researchers presenting their work. The industry desperately needs diversity and new blood as mineral processing is at the forefront of the quest for a zero carbon world by 2050. 

Young Chilean women in Sitges

There was encouraging news of the achievements of young people last month.  It was good to hear that Anna Vanderbruggen, a familiar face at many MEI Conferences, won first place in the European Institute of Innovation and Technology CHANGE Award category for developing a revolutionary new way to extract graphite from lithium-ion batteries. Her method, the first of its kind, separates the fine powder from crushed lithium-ion batteries in order to obtain two valuable products instead of one. This process enables the efficient and highly selective recycling of both graphite and metals from used lithium-ion batteries. It could lead to a truly circular battery supply chain and decrease the environmental footprint of battery production as well as reliance on raw material imports from outside the EU. I am hoping we will hear more of this at next year's Sustainable Minerals '23 in Falmouth.

Anna is a researcher at Helmholtz Institute Freiberg (HIF) for Resource Technology, Germany, and last month was awarded a PhD. Three years ago I visited HIF and met Martin Rudolph's mineral processing research team, a very impressive group of young people.

Dinner in Freiberg in 2019 with (L-R) Edgar Schach (Germany), Bruno Michaux (Belgium),
Martin Rudolph, Anna Vanderbruggen (France), Nathalie Kupka (France),
Ahmad Hassanzadeh (Iran) and Duong Hoang (Vietnam)

Apart from Anna there were two other recipients in the above photo of prestigious awards last month. Bruno Michaux, now a process engineer with Omya in Switzerland, received the “Heinrich Schubert-Prize 2022” last month, which since 2019 has been awarded by the TU Bergakademie Freiberg to commemorate Prof. Heinrich Schubert, an IMPC Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. Bruno also won the best poster prize in the Applications Symposium of Flotation '19. And last month I was pleased to present Ahmad Hassanzadeh, now with the Norwegian University of Science & Technology and Maelgwyn Mineral Services, UK, with the 2020 MEI Young Person's Award in Sitges.

We are certainly getting back to our pre-pandemic mode, and ten days after leaving Spain Amanda was travelling again, to Australia for the International Biohydrometallurgy Symposium, IBS 2022, in Perth. Her daily updates can be found on this thread.

Amanda with Dr. Anna Kaksonen, chair of the International Organising Committee

We now look forward to the next MEI event, Comminution '23 in Cape Town in April.

@barrywills