The project "BioLeach: Innovative Bio-Treatment of Raw Materials" was taken away from the submitter and project coordinator;

The original "BioLeach" project aimed to improve economic and environmentally friendly technologies - in particular bioleaching by heterotrophic bacteria - which can be applied to local deposits to obtain RMs appropriate for industrial utilisation. This should contribute to the development, competitiveness and innovativeness of Slovakia and other RIS eligible countries.

“BioLeach” project application has been written and submitted in 2018 by Darina Štyriaková to EIT RawMaterials as a RIS project, working as a researcher at TUKE from 2018. Project scope and workplan was focussed on her IP/knowledge on heterotrophic bioleaching which she had gained from her mother and along her PhD studies.
Project was on this track till end of November 2019.

"Me and my start-up ekolive s.r.o. have nothing in common with this changed project - which has nothing in common anymore and is far away from the planned impacts on RIS countries´ ecosystems by environmental treatment of raw materials on industrial scale.
Not environmental – dangerous sulphuric acid production by autotrophic and acidophilic heterotrophic bacteria due to decomposition of sulphides.
Not innovative - widely commercially used technology for sulphide ores all over the world."

ekolive s.r.o. (www.ekolive.eu) was founded in 2018 as a pre-spin-off of the "BioLeach" project with the twofold mission to disclose valuable and critical metals and to improve the quality of locally available mineral resources in Europe, both by an ecological biotechnology, and thereby significantly increase the competitiveness of local industries.
ekolive has developed a fully biological, non-toxic leaching process, using heterotrophic bacteria capable to extract different metals from their carrier materials, such as solubilizing metallic impurities in industrial minerals, transforming them from low quality to high-quality, high-value material, thus considerably increasing their market values – in addition to gaining and commercializing the metals themselves.

Manufacturing industry in the EU is strongly depending on the import of raw materials, and metals above all. EU’s industry competitiveness and circular economy can be outstandingly increased by optimization and use of local primary and secondary resources. EU’s potential is huge and existing raw materials are unexploited or wasted mostly because of current non-economic and non-ecological treatments to recover or upgrade them. Low-quality primary resources and residues such as processing and mine tailings contain a mix of valuable metals (though toxic in many cases) and high-value minerals. If at all, only hazardous and polluting leaching processes using acids and chemicals are nowadays applied to recover the metals or purify the minerals from these resources, making the extraction an additional severe threat for the environment as well as an unsafe and costly practice.
ekolive has developed a bioleaching treatment based on the application of heterotrophic bacteria, able to solubilize metallic metallic elements and occurrences from minerals and tailings with the same effect as dangerous chemical leaching: metals and high-purity minerals are easily and competitively recovered to serve different industries. ekolive allows to: 1) support the recovery and introduction of metals and minerals in the market from local primary or secondary resources; 2) use an innovative, low-cost treatment; 3) reduce the supply distance for industrial end-users, minimizing transport costs and related carbon footprints; 4) support indepedence of EU from imports, favouring a zero-waste and circular economy approach.

1. Disclosing valuable metals from primary/secondary resources, increasing local availability and accessibility.
2. Valorising and improving RM quality and generating valuable by-products – industrial minerals and fertilizer.
3. Replacing noxious and expensive chemical processes by toxic-free and cost-effective bioleaching.
4. Supporting circular economy, contributing to lower carbon footprints and import dependency of the EU.
5. Resolution of highly toxic contaminated sites from mining and processing residues.