Christoph Helbig appointed Chair of Ecological Resources Technology

Prof. Dr. Christoph Helbig comes to Bayreuth from Augsburg. There he studied physics with a focus on theoretical physics and resource strategy, and gained his doctorate in industrial engineering on the topic of assessing supply risks and dissipative losses of metals. After a stay abroad in Tokyo, where he worked as a visiting scholar at Waseda University, he returned to Germany. Helbig is well networked both at home and abroad, and has been invited to speak on global material cycles on several occasions, not only in Japan, but also in France, Great Britain, and the USA.

Helbig will begin establishing the Ecological Resource Technology research group at the University of Bayreuth’s Faculty of Engineering Science on 1 February 2022. The interdisciplinary work in Bayreuth will be important and formative for both him and his research group. They will be aiming to make material and energy flows more sustainable.

To this end, the research group will build upon three pillars:

• What material flows of metals and mineral resources occur, on which technological and societal developments do these depend, and how can we incorporate these resources more completely into cycles? This could be used, for example, to determine the recycling potential for lithium in the electric vehicles of tomorrow.
• What impact does the use of these resources have on the environment and human health, and through what processes, all the way from mining to recycling, can we make their use more sustainable?
• What processes and materials are particularly critical for the central transformative processes of our times: the transition to green energy, digitalization, and the circular economy?

Teaching is equally important to Prof. Helbig as chair: The Environmental and Resource Technology degree programme covers many of the areas he specializes in by means of research-oriented teaching, for example in the courses "Secondary Raw Materials & Recycling" and "Material Flows & Life Cycle Assessments". Supported by him, students will learn how to comprehensively and comparatively assess the environmental impact of products, how recycling rates can be calculated and critically considered, and why classification as a "critical raw material" is a question of perspective.