On June 26, 27 & 28 at CETIM facilities in A Coruña (Spain), the BIORECOVER project officially kicked off! All partners had the opportunity to discuss about the scope of the different work packages (WP) expected for this 48-month project that was launched on 1st June 2019.
The BIORECOVER project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement N.821096.

Biorecover main objective is based on the research and development of a new sustainable and safe process, essentially based on biotechnology, for selective extraction of a wide range of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs).
These waste are mainly:
- REE (Rare Earths) coming from Bauxite Residue
- (BR) Mg (Magnesium) contained in Mg wastes
- PGM (Platinum Group Metals) included in PGM low grade ores
To this end, BIORECOVER will be based on the integration of three main stages to reach the expected recovery rates (90%), selectivity (95%) and purity (99%):
- (1) Pre-Treatment – To remove the major impurities presents in raw materials sources to achieve the greater availability of the target metals for their recovery.
- (2) Treatment – To mobilise these metals through specific and improved microorganisms to get a leachate enriched with the target CRMs.
- (3) Post-Treatment – To develop of a specific technology for recovering metals with high selectivity and purity that meet the quality requirements for its reuse.

Final Materials
Downstream processing of the extracted Critical Raw Materials will be studied to achieve the meet quality requirements for their reuse in different applications such as brake pads, catalysts, oxygen sensors or powder Mg.

Implementation
Biorecover consists of 9 Work Packages (WP) that include the necessary activities to ensure the proposal objectives are implemented and the expected impacts are met.
WP1: Characterisation and conditioning of raw materials
WP2: Pre-treatment to remove uninteresting material
WP3: Treatment for mobilisation of interesting CRM
WP4: R & D of different strategies for metal recovery
WP5: Overall process integration, optimisation and validation
WP6: Validation of metals recovered on the raw material value chain
WP7: Sustainability, Social, Health, Safety and Economic aspects
WP8: Exploitation, Dissemination and Communication strategy
WP9: Project Management
WP10: Ethics requirements

Partners
The BIORECOVER project is led by CETIM Technological Center (Spain) and involves a multidisciplinary consortium that encompass the whole value chain and key international cooperation such as UWITS and CeBER from South Africa.
