The objective of ‘INSPIRE’ is to understand and manipulate the biogeochemistry of waste within waste repositories (e.g. landfills, industrial waste, municipal solid waste, metallurgical and mining waste) to recover valuable resources by leaching and other treatments whilst the material lies in situ. This avoids the need to actively extract the material and thereby minimises ecological and environmental impacts. Appropriate benchmarking will be developed for these recovery processes in terms of life-cycle (societal, economic, cultural and environmental impacts) and their impact on ecosystems services.
Specifically, INSPIRE seeks to:
This project takes place at Cardiff University, Warwick University & the University of the West of England. More information is available from the website: http://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/inspire/