Learn about the Circular Economy of Metals
On 22 January 2018, the Massive Open Online Course ’A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism’ kicks off. This course is developed and taught by associate professor Ester van der Voet.
Metals: a limited and valuable source
Metals are present everywhere around us. They are, for instance, indispensable for our smart phones, computers and, of course, our means of transportation. In emerging economies, as well as industrialized countries, the demand for these metals is increasing rapidly. Mining and production activities are expanding, and so are the environmental consequences of metal production processes.
Learn how to close the cycle
In the Massive Open Online Course ’A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism’, those consequences and options to move towards a more sustainable system of metals production and use will be explored. We will focus especially on the options to reach a circular economy for metals: keeping metals in use for a very long time, to avoid having to mine new ones.
Tackling the global metal challenge
This course is based on the series of reports on metals of the International Resource Panel that is part of UN Environment. An important addition are the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ambitious goals that we will use as a touching stone for the assessment of the metals challenge, as well as the solutions we present in this course to solve that challenge.
Enroll now!
As of now the course ‘A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism’ is open for enrollment. On Monday 22 January the first lecture will be available online. The course will take a total of 6 weeks. The instructor is professor Ester van der Voet from the Institute of Environmental Sciences.
To the MOOC course ‘A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism’