Projects

This Centre of Excellence (CoE) focuses on fostering innovation in resource efficiency, promoting circular economy practices, utilizing local resources, ensuring safe material circulation, and educating researchers to reduce environmental impacts. It centers around four key areas: Strategic Mineral Resources (SMR), Carbon-Based Resources (CBR), Circular Technologies Upscaling (CTU), and Circular Business Eco-System and Modeling (CBEM). The SMR group maps critical materials in waste streams, including renewables, for extraction and reuse while minimizing hazardous waste. The CBR group develops eco-friendly pathways for essential chemicals and plastics, also assessing their environmental impact. The CTU group pioneers waste reduction and recycling methods for aqueous, and solid waste, incl. water purification. The CBEM group analyzes sustainable business ecosystems and value chains. This CoE's interdisciplinary approach will benefit both Estonia and Europe by advancing circular economy.

This Centre of Excellence (CoE) focuses on fostering innovation in resource efficiency, promoting circular economy practices, utilizing local resources, ensuring safe material circulation, and educating researchers to reduce environmental impacts. It centers around four key areas: Strategic Mineral Resources (SMR), Carbon-Based Resources (CBR), Circular Technologies Upscaling (CTU), and Circular Business Eco-System and Modeling (CBEM). The SMR group maps critical materials in waste streams, including renewables, for extraction and reuse while minimizing hazardous waste. The CBR group develops eco-friendly pathways for essential chemicals and plastics, also assessing their environmental impact. The CTU group pioneers waste reduction and recycling methods for aqueous, and solid waste, incl. water purification. The CBEM group analyzes sustainable business ecosystems and value chains. This CoE's interdisciplinary approach will benefit both Estonia and Europe by advancing circular economy.

For each Baltic Sea country, the quality of the Baltic Sea is of fundamental economic, environmental and recreational importance. Contaminated stormwater generated both in coastal areas of the Baltic Sea and the leaching from inland waters produces a risk that should not go unnoticed. However, it is often still overlooked and requires solutions. At the same time, old buildings are demolished in Baltic cities, creating huge amounts of construction and demolition waste (CDW) which is difficult to recycle and often ends up in landfills. However, CDW may be used as stormwater filtering material, with very low cost. The StoPWa project develops and tests multilayer stormwater filtration systems using CDW. The filters will be made of waste fractions perfectly meeting the criteria ideal for stormwater purification. The filtration system will be expedient, cost-efficient and sustainable. The filters will be tested both in laboratory environments and in field tests where full-scale stormwater filters will be constructed in Lahti (Finland) and in Harju County (Estonia). The result of the StoPWa project is a tested solution for using CDW in stormwater filters. This type of filter has not been applied before, so the mindset and solution are novel. The new filter will benefit SMEs across borders in creating a business idea and opportunities, as well as cities and municipalities with a new, climate-friendly solution to stormwater treatment. To be replicable in different cities from local CDW, waste-based filters in their design and implementation require cross-border cooperation between municipalities and researchers in the Baltic Sea region. The project partnership is: City of Lahti, LUT University, University of Helsinki, Tallinn University of Technology, Union of Harju County Municipalities and Smiltene municipality.

ABtomat project aims at the aluminum products development derived from aluminum-containing industrial wastes - mining and manufacturing tails. Often not designed for pure metal extraction, the recovery methods are able to produce useful and doable aluminum-containing compositions, such as coagulants, alumo-silicate and zeolite catalyst supports and adsorbents, testing of which lays on the Laboratory of Environmental Technology of Tallinn University of Technology. Testing is planned in water/wastewater treatment applications, as well as in photocatalytic systems for air cleaning.