The RESOPT project is part of the 'Eco-efficient society' environmental cluster research programme of the Ministry of Environment. The project is co-ordinated at the Mass and Heat Transfer Process Laboratory of the University of Oulu, Department of Process and Environmental Engineering  The project duration is 1.7.2003 - 30.6.2005.

The purpose of the consortium

• Join forces of research-, industrial-, administrative- and regulating bodies toward the goal of resources use optimisation.
• Promote Best Practice in local industry by implementing waste minimisation and clean technology. To this end:
• Investigate the applicability of tools developed by the UK ENVIROWISE programme.
• Promote integrated resources management through the utilisation of secondary materials.
• Provide a co-ordinated approach to addressing the issue of finding a proper definition for waste.
• Provide and encourage communication between researchers and practitioners such that scientific advances can be more readily understood and adopted.
• Bring together the supply and utilisation sides of secondary material use, to foster a greater understanding of the benefits of by-product synergies.

Objectives

1. Waste Definition in Legislation and its Environmental Impact:
2. Toward an Integrated Material Policy.
3. In the first instance, this consortium wishes to provide a co-ordinated approach to addressing the issues of finding a proper definition for waste. Wastes will be analysed by the reason of their generation, as prevention requires knowledge of the cause.
4. Methodology development for waste management:
5. Focus on the waste management hierarchy
6. World-wide, waste minimisation is on the top of hierarchy of waste management options. To facilitate waste minimisation – and thereby resource use conservation –, the main roles of waste management are waste avoidance, and turning wastes to non-wastes. Waste prevention, however, starts at the design table: products have to be planned considering re-use, recycling, and refurbishment; processes need to be designed in view of waste minimisation.
7. Establishing a local ‘Waste Intelligence Network’
8. The main purpose of this initiative is mapping of material flows, and locating waste sinks, and loose ends.
9. Secondary material utilisation through waste exchanges and new product development
10. When the supply and utilisation sides of secondary material use are mapped, we will aim at closing material flows through by-product synergies under the paradigm of Industrial Ecology.

Project duration: 1.7.2003-30.6.2005

Project participants

• University of Oulu

Process and Environmental Engineering Department

Department of Architecture

Department of Industrial Management and Entrepreneurship

Department of Chemistry

• City of Oulu Environmental Bureau

• North Ostrobothnia Regional Environment Centre

• Municipal Solid Waste Management of Oulu

• Meri-Lappi Institute

• Nene University College Northampton, SITA Centre for 

          Sustainable Waste Management

• Luleå University of Technology, Waste division

Resopt's activity