Lettinga Award 2019
The 2019 Lettinga Award is won by the project “Anaerobic bioreduction of waterborne element sulphide particles for recovery from electronic waste” submitted by Dr. Simon Hageman. The judges were unanimous about the project due to the potential great impact if proven successful. This year’s Lettinga Award call was for innovative project ideas for closing resource cycles by deploying anaerobic technology. The winner was announced during the closing ceremony of the IWA Anaerobic Digestion conference in Delft on June 26, 2019.
The submitted project concerns the application of anaerobic digestion of wastewaters from electronic waste to recover resources. E-waste recycling processes include an acid leaching step that results in a leachate containing finite and scarce metals (eg Cu, Zn, Mn, Bi, Ag, Se ...). The objective of this project idea is to bioprocess the waterborne elemental sulfide particles to biogenic sulfide through anaerobic digestion. The resulting will be a biogenic sulfide of high quality and pure form that can be recycled into industrial applications.
The project idea was submitted by Simon Hageman. Dr Hageman is a lecturer and researcher at the Sustainable Energy Systems group at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in Enschede, the Netherlands.