HDR defence of Baptise LAUBIE

Title: From metal-bearing waste to biosourced metals: development of hydrometallurgical processes for Agromining Abstract: As the global demand for strategic metals (nickel, rare earths, etc.) increases and primary resources become depleted, the development of processes to recover these elements from secondary sources is becoming a major challenge for our society. Chemical engineering, as an integrative science, plays a fundamental role in the development of new processes, both on a laboratory scale and in an industrial environment, and in the evaluation of the environmental performance of the proposed solutions. In particular, the treatment of metal-bearing waste (waste, mine tailings, soil, etc.) requires the implementation of new approaches to the concentration and separation of target metals. Hyperaccumulator plants are capable of dramatically concentrating certain metals in their biomass. For some years now, the concept of agromining has aimed to use these plants to produce metals from abandoned areas. The aim is to include plant hyperaccumulation as a unitary operation in an extractive metallurgy process scheme. Thus, the work presented here looks back on seven years of scientific research on this subject, one of the outstanding results of which is the marketing of the first objects produced with biosourced metals. Jury : Dr I. Billard, CNRS LEPMI, Grenoble Pr F. Bourgeois, ENSIACET, Toulouse E. Van Hullebusch, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Paris Pr A. Chagnes, Université de Lorraine, Nancy Pr M. Matlosz, Université de Lorraine, Nancy Dr M.-N. Pons, CNRS LRGP, Nancy Pr M.-O. Simonnot, Université de Lorraine, Nancy Pr J.L. Morel, Université de Lorraine, Nancy