VTI joins project for Responsible Metal Industry in Europe

The mining and metal industry want to grow their metal value chains while encouraging a long-term shift towards climate-neutrality and sustainability. In doing so they play a vital role in the sustainability of EU’s climate technologies. They aim to ensure the highest protection of human and environmental health, addressing and reinforcing the relationship of the industry with the wider society. The SISTEM project: Social Innovation for Sustainable Treatment of European Metals will work in a public private collaboration to develop a framework to assess the values at stake in this process.

SISTEM provides for a great opportunity for TPM to lead the assessment of the social performance of the mining and metal industry in the framework of sustainability, safety, and circularity values. The TU Delft team consist of Behnam Taebi, Jaco Quist, Eveline Vreede, and Santiago Echeverri.  Assessing how a company handles its commitments and activities in their interaction with  local communities, are priorities in our research. The assessment framework will shape open and honest communication regarding potentially undesired consequences, investigating how to solve them, respecting people's ownership, use of land and territory, systems of social and political organisation, livelihood systems, and human exposure.

The SISTEM project is developed with Atlantic Copper SL (Spain), Magnesitas Navarras S.A. (Spain), Outotec (Finland) as industrial partners, and the National Technical University of Athens and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche as academics associates.