EU-Advanced Mining Raw Materials Diplomacy event on mining policies and technologies

On the 28th and 29th of June 2016 the ‘Exchange of best practices on mining policies and technologies’ event hosted by the European Commission (DG GROW) took place at the Hotel Metropole, in Brussels.

The challenges for the mining sector in the current state of the global economy and commodity prices (economic issues, investment, innovation, readjustments both from governments and industry, etc.) as well as the mining waste management and the ongoing EU actions on international co-operation on raw materials were discussed among several other topics.  Speakers from all over the world: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and the US participated.
Mrs Lowri Evans, the Director-General from DG GROW, welcomed the attendees with a very engaging speech mentioning President Juncker’s plans about Horizon 2020: “We use this research innovation program to bring together partners from around the globe with 600 million euro committed to 28 successful projects on raw material  before 2020. ”and: “In our technologies projects the program is wide enough to cover the entire value chain of raw materials and our projects are developing very interesting aspects (…) to try to unlock new innovative solutions.” Finally, she ended her speech by saying: ”The more we are approaching things in an intimated way the better we are able to help the mining industry, deliver what we need for the European economy, for the global economy and for the benefit of people”.

The President of the EuroGeoSurveys, Mr. Koen Verbruggen, pointed out the contribution of the European Geological Surveys (EGS) that are all together  dealing with the geoscience challenges. He underlined the importance of the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) on raw materials:” We are trying to match these needs to progress these issues on technologies to deal with challenges with the EU funding mechanism” and also develop the EU projects on the mining sector which EGS are involved in (eg. ProSUM, Minerals4EU, PanafGeo, ERA-NET).

This event was a follow-up to the ‘EU-Advanced mining countries Raw Materials Diplomacy Dialogue’.