WATCH: 60 Seconds of Science - Mercury and the Environment

Thursday, 2 January 2025

Hazardous materials like mercury still exist in our built environment in our buildings and in things like batteries and lamps - but what happens to these materials when products reach the end of their life cycle?

Associate Professor Yvonne Ryan-Fogarty's research at University of Limerick looks at how we can recover critical raw materials from products at their end of life, and how we can prevent hazardous materials within these products like mercury from entering our environment.

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Dr Yvonne Ryan-Fogarty is a Science Foundation Ireland Pathways Fellow and Associate Professor in Environmental Science within the Department of Chemical Science. Her research expertise is industrial ecology and material flow analysis, focusing on challenges facing the emergent circular economy. Her work addresses high environmental impact waste streams, hazardous components, and product demand for critical materials. She was nominated by the Irish Government to the Open-Ended Scientific Group on effectiveness evaluation of the Minamata Convention on Mercury as she contributed to refining the Mercury Inventory Toolkit in products-to-waste material flows. As part of the EEE2WEEE project, she worked with policy makers and the scrap metal industry to develop a material flow analysis protocol that was inexpensive and non-disruptive to waste management business operations. This methodology is currently used and cited by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to report waste statistics to the EU.
She was previously project manager of STRIKE, an EU-funded project on transboundary movements of hazardous waste streams. Earlier work on industrial ecology led to the development of material flow analysis of over 20 enterprises from the engineering, technology and agri-food sectors. She worked extensively in the NGO and voluntary sector on sustainability in higher education. She led the initial development of the International Green-Campus Programme in Ireland. She oversaw higher education's role in the development of environmental sustainability initiatives in Cork University Hospital and has published highly cited research on this topic.