Dr Masoud Ahmadinia Archives

The Aluminium Action Plan: Charting a Sustainable Path Forward

The Aluminium Action Plan: Charting a Sustainable Path Forward

The aluminium industry, with its extensive global influence and importance, finds itself at a crucial crossroads. Recognising the vast potential of this metal in the shift towards a circular economy, the Aluminium Action Plan was devised. This thorough plan provides a distinct direction for the future of the aluminium industry in the UK, underscoring its endless recyclability and the nation's aspiration for sustainable growth. The Action Plan is the fruit of in-depth consultations with UK industry, government, and academia. It sketches a strategic roadmap, detailing short, medium, and long-term goals. These span from immediate actions to address current shortcomings to transformative steps intended to revamp the system entirely. The plan's primary areas of focus encompass circular design, recovery, and business models: Circular Design: This pertains to the creation of products designed for straightforward disassembly, reuse, or recycling. By adopting a circular mindset in design, the industry can ensure products [...]

Joanna Johnson2023-09-11T10:54:16+00:00September 11th, 2023|

The Royal Mint’s Journey in Electronic Waste Management

TransFIRe researcher, Dr Masoud Ahmadinia, has recently finished a project working with The Royal Mint on their innovative initiative to extract precious metals from the circuit boards of electronic waste, such as laptops and mobile phones, in order to create an eco-friendly jewellery line. The Royal Mint is working in collaboration with Excir, a Canadian clean tech start-up, to use their patented technology, based on revolutionary chemistry and aims to leverage advanced technologies and innovative methodologies to enhance the extraction process. As part of a secondment, Dr Ahmadinia spent a number of days embedded within The Royal Mint, after which, a range of documentation and analysis was produced. These included a Sankey diagram, visually representing the material and energy flow of the processes involved in order to understand their efficiency and identify potential opportunities, as well as a comprehensive cost analysis report for the energy use of processes. As [...]

Joanna Johnson2023-12-15T14:22:05+00:00September 11th, 2023|

Investigating alternative uses for Spent Foundry Sand

After an extensive literature review by TransFIRe researchers, a number of potential applications for re-using huge quantities of Spent Foundry Sand (SFS) have been identified. As part of Work Stream 2 of the TransFIRe project, which focusses on creating new materials and process opportunities for the foundation industries, TransFIRe researchers have been undertaking a case study focussing on potential uses of Spent Foundry Sand (SFS), a waste product of UK metals foundries leftover after the production of sand moulds or cores for casting of metals. A literature review, carried out with input from the Cast Metals Federation, John Winter Ltd and Wm Lee Ltd, was undertaken to identify potential opportunities for re-using SFS and several applications were identified within ceramics, glass, cement, fillers in concrete and asphalt; and several others. Although SFS can be successfully recycled and used numerous times, the sand grains eventually degrade and their ability to [...]

Joanna Johnson2023-05-15T08:44:48+00:00May 15th, 2023|