OREANDA-NEWS. September 07, 2011. From TUT Department of Mining will be represented by teaching assistant Veiko Karu and specialists Raili Kukk and Ain Anepaio, reported the press-centre of TUT.

MIN-NOVATION is a European Union Baltic Sea Region project “Mining and Mineral Processing Innovation Network for Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises in Waste Technologies”. Project partners are from Poland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Estonia.

In Estonia, the project is focussed on utilising and analising mainly on oil shale waste rock and aggregate production, separating and depositing.

MIN-NOVATION aims to create a trans-national network with regional networks as building blocks of effective multi-lateral cooperation. The activities carried out on the regional and transnational level will secure better access to knowledge, state-of-the-art technologies and good practice to SMEs (small and medium enterprices) active in the mineral waste management & prevention sector. The project will address all the waste management challenges and opportunities which face the Baltic Sea Region mining industry, which should be understood as extending to all forms of extraction of natural non-renewable resources.

The goal of setting up the MIN-NOVATION regional networks (MRNs) will be to bring together organizations which make up the key stakeholder groups in the mineral waste management sector and have them analyze key challenges and opportunities facing that sector. Particular attention will go to issues of old mining waste landfills, current waste production and storage, waste handling procedures, entrepreneurship development and the legal framework for waste management.

MIN-NOVATION project is part R&D activity in Department of Mining and is related to the study of “Conditions of sustainable mining”, GRANT7499 - mi.ttu.ee/ETF7499; „Backfilling and waste management in Estonian oil shale industry“, GRANT8123 - mi.ttu.ee/ETF8123.