Early achievements for ProSUM data collation project

Europe – ProSUM, an international consortium led by the WEEE Forum e-scrap producer responsibility association, has given details of plans for an ‘EU Urban Mine Knowledge Data Platform’ which will mean data about materials arising in waste electrical and electronic equipment, end-of-life vehicles, batteries and mining wastes being collated in one place for the first time.

‘The lack of reliable harmonised data has long been a barrier to quantifying the potential availability of recycled raw materials,’ states the WEEE Forum’s secretary general Pascal Leroy. ‘This project is a significant step forward in improving understanding. For e-waste alone, we have already improved the picture for stocks and flows of end-of-life products.’

Achievements of the ProSUM project to date also include the development of a harmonised data classification system and early insights into data collation. The project’s leader Sarah Downes comments: ‘We now have over 200 members in our information network. The project will only be a success if our stakeholders, or end users, have data and intelligence which is meaningful to them.’

The project is focused on products and wastes containing critical raw materials and will construct a comprehensive inventory mapping stocks and flows at national levels across Europe. This will be accessed by a user-friendly portal with data filtering capability, advanced search capabilities, statistics computation, automated report generation and map visualisations.

Ultimately, the ProSUM initiative aims to provide better information for policy-makers to shape the transition to a circular economy, for academia to define research priorities and for industry to source and recycle more secondary raw materials.