Purpose:

Critical minerals and elements are highly significant for Europe’s economy, particularly within strategic sectors. However, the demand for new, often essential materials conflicts with the decreasing activity in primary raw material mining. As a result, there is an impending need to fulfil these demands within European borders, reducing reliance on third countries. This was recently reflected in the European Raw Materials Act as a clear necessity from the EU, being a potential solution the use of green and non-invasive technologies to recover and refine CRMs.

Besides this, it is known that the reserves and productions of mineral resources in Slovakia are mainly located in Kosice region (46% Slovak geological reserves), thereby, enhanced networking and positioning activities between TUKE and the topclass leading research institutions are needed in order to close the still apparent research and innovation gap within the EU. Furthermore, TUKE is a distinguished mining university and serves as the primary reference centre within Slovakia, which is aimed to be boosted and reinforced in three main strategy lines through several learning tools and materials

The strategy is structured around the following key areas :

• Exploration, recovery and mining monitoring exploitation.
• Capacity to drive sustainability, circularity and social assessments.
• Strengthening TUKE’s research management & coordination capacities, and administrative skills.

Consentia’s role:

Consentia is responsible for the delivery of knowledge transfer activities related Social Licence to Operate (SLO) and Social Assessments within the extractive industries. Interactive sessions will be carried out to strengthen TUKE’s institutional and operational capacity to understand and apply SLO frameworks. These sessions are embedded within a broader training programme that also covers Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC), Social Assessment, Valorisation, and Circularity.

Results:

Among the core deliverables anticipated from WIDEX are: the

• Creation of an industrial Cluster for Critical Raw Materials in Slovakia.
• Development of a virtual Centre and Stakeholder Community Platform Strengthening TUKE’s research management & coordination capacities, and administrative skills.
• The Creation of a Whitebook with lessons learned and guidelines for replication of similar twinning actions across Europe.

Partners and clients:

The WIDEX project brings together a consortium of 11 partners from 7 European countries, led by the Technical University of Košice (TUKE) in Slovakia. The partnership includes academic institutions, research centres, industry clusters, and regional authorities: ICAMCYL Foundation, Iberian Sustainable Mining Cluster (ISMC), MNLT Innovations, Fraunhofer IKTS, IDENER, Lapland University of Applied Sciences (Lapland UAS), Polê Avenia, EIT RawMaterials CLC East, and the Košice Regional Government.