Keynote Speakers

Paul Bardos is managing director of r3 Environmental Technology Ltd (www.r3environmental.com) and adjunct Professor at the School of Environment and Technology, University of Brighton.  He is visiting professor at the Universities of Nottingham (till 2017) and Reading.  He is a “qualified person” under the CL:AIRE DOW-COP initiative for auditing the re-use of soil and other excavated materials. He works on contaminated land management, brownfields rehabilitation and renewables, weed control, circular economy and waste management (biochar, composting, AD, MBT); sustainable remediation; projects in the UK, EU, China, Japan, South America, USA and Australia.  He is also a project proposal evaluator for the EC and national governments and “green and sustainable remediation international expert” for the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in China.  His work includes major research initiatives, feasibility studies, technology development, expert consultancy and technical advice, policy support, market entry/brokerage, due diligence, sustainability assessments and information projects.  His company operates the principal European contaminated soil and water portal (EUGRIS).

Peter Tom Jones (Dr. Ir.) is a KU Leuven IOF (Industrial Research Fund) Senior Research Manager in the field of sustainable metallurgy. Since 2014 he is the General Coordinator of the interdisciplinary SIM² KU Leuven Research Cluster. He is actively engaged as (vice-)coordinator and/or exploitation manager of several EU Horizon 2020 ETN/RIA and EIT RawMaterials  projects (see overview here). He is the coordinator of EURELCO and the associated EU MSCA-ETN NEW-MINE project on Enhanced Landfill Mining. From a public engagement point of view, Jones has also given more than 600 lectures related to urban/landfill mining, climate change (mitigation) and transition management. He is the author of several books, including Het klimaatboek, Klimaatcrisis, Terra Incognita & Terra Reversa.

Kate is a Professor of Environmental Geochemistry at Queen Mary University of London. She is an interdisciplinary coastal scientist focussing on the behaviour of sediment and associated contaminants in coastal, estuarine and fluvial environments. She has a particular interest in coastal restoration and management, examining the impacts of disturbance on contaminant behaviour and integrating physical and geochemical data to understand ecosystem function. More recently, she has been investigating the pollution impacts from historic coastal landfills, and working with her PhD students has proposed a national screening assessment and provided expert advice on the management of historic coastal landfill and diffuse pollution to the Environment Agency, United Nations and the Department for Environment Farming and Rural Affairs.

Dr. Ir. Claudia Neculau is now the Head of the R&D and Innovation Department at Spaque Company, after having worked during 7 years in the Rehabilitation Department at the same company. As Field manager in the works department, her role involves land remediation work and demolitions of buildings on brownfields sites, and she specialises in applying the expertise of her company to other countries.  To date, Claudia has a decade of experience as a Civil Engineer in Belgium. She manages and she surveys the execution of works especially for brownfields (former military site, sites polluted with acid tar). During the last 4 years she coordinated several applications for European projects within Interreg and Horizon 20220 programmes, and now she is the coordinator of an Interreg NWE project named Rawfill, in the field of landfill mining. She studied in a Hydro technical University in Romania, followed by a DESS degree in Public relations and Environment in Paris, and subsequently she obtained her title of Doctor in the field of the final evaluation of settlements on the landfills. Established in 1991, Spaque is currently the foremost company specializing in landfills rehabilitation, brownfield remediation and environmental expertise. Due to this experience, the company is recognised as a turnkey operator and main contractor on an international level, always applying a scientific environmental approach.

Frédéric Nguyen obtained his PhD degree at the Université de Liège in close collaboration with the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France (Prof. Denis Jongmans) in 2005 dedicated to the development and application of geophysical methods to detect and image active faults in slowly deforming regions. From a seismic hazard point of view, his research allowed unveiling surface ruptures associated with the strongest earthquake recorded in France (Provence) in the twentieth century. He then worked from 2005 to 2008 as a post-doctoral researcher at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany within the framework of the European project ALERT on the sustainable management of water resources by automated real-time monitoring in coastal aquifers. His research interest then shifted towards environmental geophysics and inverse problems. Since 2007, he is a Professor in Applied Geophysics at the University of Liège where he leads a research team, and was appointed in 2010 as a part-time Professor at KU Leuven. The research focus of his group lies on one hand in producing models of the subsurface using non-invasive geophysical methods and associated topics (inverse problems, data assimilation, uncertainty quantification) and on another hand in the integration of geophysical data in highly multidisciplinary fields of research such as hydrogeology, biology, or landfills mining.

Yves Tielemans holds a Master’s Degree in Physics (1999, KU Leuven Belgium) and an additional Master’s degree in Project Management (2009). He is also PMP® Certified by PMI® (2009). Within Group Machiels he is a seasoned Business Unit and Program Manager leading the implementation of integrated sustainable waste management solutions, traditional landfill mining projects as well as the Enhanced Landfill Mining concept and more specific Group Machiels’ Closing the Circle project by establishing a quadruple helix network that supports the required technological, legal, social, economic, environmental and organisational innovation. He was Project Coordinator of the Flemish IWT O&O CtC project, co-organiser of the International Academic Symposia on Enhanced Landfill Mining and editor of the accompanying Symposium books. [https://twitter.com/tielemay & http://www.linkedin.com/pub/yves-tielemans-pmp/7/60/37a]

Eddy Wille is Senior advisor at the Public Waste Agency of Flanders (OVAM, Department of Soil Management) and negotiator/representative of the Flemish government in Brownfield covenant projects. Eddy obtained his Master degree Geology at University Ghent and a postgraduate in Human ecology at University Brussels.  Since 1991, he’s involved in the Flanders soil remediation policy and pioneering in OVAM’s ELFM-programme. He is the OVAM-representative in EURELCO and collaborator in the Interreg projects COCOON and RAWFill. He’s also member of the Advisory board of EU MSCA-ETN NEW-MINE.

Juan Carlos is a civil engineer specialized in the management and treatment of residues. He obtained his engineering degree at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and completed a master´s program in “Air Quality Control, Solid Waste and Waste Water Process Engineering” at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Juan Carlos has about 8 years of work experience in the waste management sector, having lead the operation and development of one of the first integrated waste management projects in Mexico City and been involved in the design and enhancement of biodrying plants for the production of RDF in Germany. Currently, Juan Carlos works at Renewi Belgium and is a PhD candidate at the Montanuniversität Leoben, being one of the Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) of the Work Package 1 (WP1) in the NEW-MINE project. One of his main tasks within the project is to enable material and energy recovery from the fine fractions in the framework of Enhanced Landfill Mining (ELFM).

Hugo Lucas is an Industrial Engineering (2007) with two master’s degrees, one in Material Sciences (2009) and the second in Energy (2016). He currently works as a scientific assistant at IME (Institute for Process Metallurgy and Metal Recycling) RWTH Aachen University. Since 2017 he is one of the ESRs from the EU MSCA-ETN NEW-MINE project on Enhanced Landfill Mining. His research focuses on slag modelling and mineral waste conditioning using submerged arc furnaces. Over the past three years, he has been studying the vitrification of municipal solid waste incineration ashes (MSWI) ashes and landfills waste residues with the aims of generating mineral precursors used to produce eco-friendly building materials and, simultaneously, enhance the recovery of metals.

Yamid Gomez Rueda is a chemical engineer focused on the energy and chemical generation from renewable sources. After graduating from his bachelor he worked in the power generation industry as production engineer, and developed a strong interest in greener energy generation systems. In 2016 he completed a master’s degree at Sorbonne University and Ecole Normale Superieure researching the valorization of glycerol, a waste byproduct generated during the production of biofuels. From 2017 onwards, he has been working as a Ph.D. researcher at KU Leuven dealing with the use of a plasma to generate tar-free syngas from excavated Municipal-Solid Waste.

Giovanna Sauve is a third year PhD-student at KU Leuven. She is an ‘early-stage researcher’ of the ETN NEW-MINE project. Her PhD is focused on the environmental impact assessment of LFM. In particular, her research aims at including site-specific factors and parameter variability in the environmental impact assessment of landfills and ELFM valorization routes. She holds an Energy Engineering degree of the University Politecnico di Milano, and obtained her Master’s degree in Energy Innovation and Smart Cities from KTH, Stockholm, and UPC, Barcelona, under the EIT InnoEnergy programme “Energy for Smart Cities”. She is currently working at the university of Leuven in the ‘Sustainability Assessments of Material Life Cycles and Circular Economy’ (SAM-Group).