Today, the ideology of limitless technological progress is giving way to the concept of sustainable development, which takes into account the interests not only of the present but also of future generations. One of the areas of implementation of this concept is the use (recycling) of production and consumption waste, accumulated in dumps and landfills and representing artificial raw materials.

Issues of waste recycling and environmental pollution control occupy an important place in the structure of scientific research of the Mining University.
The main production wastes that are promising in terms of recycling are: coal mining and combustion wastes, mine dumps and ash and slag wastes, waste from mining and processing enterprises, metallurgical slags, oil waste and drilling sludge, associated petroleum gas, washing and waste water from enterprises, as well as municipal solid wastes from cities and agglomerations.

The technology of coking is the most demanded from the point of view of increasing the depth of oil refining. It allows increasing refining depth at refineries up to 90-98 %. The total load of delayed coking units in Russia by 2021 is about 12.6 million tons, which is more than twice as much as in 2011. The target purpose of the delayed coking process can be both production of petroleum coke and liquid distillates - components of hydrocarbon fuels.

Needle coke, which is the most valuable and marginal product, is also produced in delayed coking units, and it is required in the production of graphitized products for metallurgical plants; first of all, the electric steel industry, the functioning of which is impossible without large-sized graphitized electrodes.

At present, the university conducts research on creating technology for creating highly anisotropic needle coke for UHP electrodes (microstructures up to 6-6.5 points) from a full range of domestic oil, coal and gas technogenic raw materials.

Priority areas for the development of research and development in the field of industrial waste recycling are also:

• Effective technologies for the processing of solid minerals, including energy-saving complex processing of hard-to-enrich natural and technogenic mineral raw materials;
• Technologies for industrial-scale processing of mining and processing waste;
• Technologies for utilization of associated petroleum gas; and
• Environmentally safe technologies for recycling solid domestic waste.