How Tapojärvi winner and EIT Change Maker nominee Shah Saud is rethinking mining waste
AMIR Master’s graduate, entrepreneur and Tapojärvi Challenge 2025 winner Shah Saud has been nominated for the EIT Change Maker Award for his work co-founding GeoCura, a startup turning mine tailings into sustainable construction materials.
Every year, around 600 million tonnes of finely ground rock and liquid waste – better known as mine tailings – are generated across Europe. Left over after extracting valuable minerals or metals from mined ore, tailings have to be managed and stored and can remain an environmental issue long after mining operations have ended.
GeoCura, a startup co-founded by Shah during the EIT-labelled AMIR Master’s programme, is developing a way to put this material to use. Its technology uses mine tailings to produce cement-free geopolymer concrete, while incorporating bacteria that give the material self-healing properties designed to extend its useful life.
Now nominated in the Change Maker category of the EIT Awards, Shah spoke to us about the journey from student project to startup – and his ambition to change the way we think about waste.
Where the idea began
The idea behind GeoCura came during Shah’s first year of the AMIR Master’s programme at NOVA FCT in Lisbon. Visits to mining operations included a large copper mine in Alentejo, Portugal, where the scale of its tailings dams brought the waste challenge into focus.
When we visited the mine and saw the amount of material there, we knew this was a problem we wanted to work on. Then we had the opportunity through our course to start looking for a solution.
Shah Saud, Co-founder, GeoCura
That opportunity came through a semester-long research project in the university’s civil engineering department. Shah worked alongside a team of fellow students, including mining engineers already familiar with the tailings problem, to investigate whether the material could be used to produce cement-free concrete.
The project developed further when one of Shah’s future GeoCura co-founders, who had experience working with bacteria, proposed giving the material self-healing properties. Bringing their different expertise together, the team spent around a year developing and testing the two elements, with promising early results laying the foundations for what would become GeoCura.
Taking GeoCura beyond the lab
GeoCura combines mining and construction with biotechnology, making it difficult to find people who could advise across the different fields.
One of our biggest challenges was finding the right experts and resources. We needed to bridge mining and construction with biology and bacteria – fields that don’t normally have much to do with each other.
Shah Saud, Co-founder, GeoCura
A major step came when GeoCura won the Tapojärvi Challenge 2025, organised by EIT RawMaterials. Over four months, the team received mentoring on the technical and commercial sides of its solution before pitching to industry experts in the final.
For Shah, meeting companies already exploring new approaches provided important validation. “It was encouraging to see these very conventional industries moving towards solutions that are a bit more out of the box,” he says. “It gave us more of a green light to go forward with the idea.”
The relationship with Tapojärvi continued after the competition. Shah completed his Master’s thesis with the company and now works there as a trainee, drawing on its circular-economy expertise as GeoCura moves towards larger-scale testing.
Shah has also continued to draw on the wider EIT RawMaterials network, including through the EIT RawMaterials Summit in 2026, to find potential collaborators and expertise.
Changing how we think about waste
Today, GeoCura is registered in Albania, where two of Shah’s co-founders have connections to the mining sector. At TRL 4–5, the team is testing different tailings, raising funding, and working towards a larger-scale pilot.
But for Shah, the longer-term goal goes way beyond one technology.
The big challenge with the waste problem is that we don’t look at waste as a resource. Once we start looking at waste as a resource, we will be in a much better place to make use of it.
Shah Saud, Co-founder, GeoCura
Asked what change he would like to look back on in ten years, Shah returned to the same idea: a future in which materials that are now discarded are increasingly recognised and used as resources.
“I feel like we are heading towards a time like that,” he says. “If we get to that point, it will be something that I’ll be really proud of – being part of the community and the sector that helped make that change happen.”
Shah Saud has been nominated for the Change Maker category of the EIT Awards 2026. Vote for Shah and help us celebrate the people in the EIT RawMaterials community working to build a more circular future.
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