euronews innovation – The roaming recycler

www.euronews.com A mobile recycling facility being tested in eastern and southern Europe is aiming to get the most from electronic waste. Bernd Kopacek, managing director of SAT in Austria, explained: “We have developed a machine which is mobile, that means we can move from one recycler to another recycler and extract rare and precious substances from electronic waste, mainly metals, like for example, gold or silver or copper, or yttrium, lithium and so on.” The mobile recycling system sits inside a container – and is currently parked on the outskirts of Belgrade. The idea is to give small recycling companies new ways to extract precious metals from electronic junk. Francesco Veglio, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of L’Aquila in Italy, said: “As an example this is a powder that you find in cathode tubes, but this part of the waste that contains a large quantity of yttrium, nearly 10 per cent, is usually sent to the dump.” The TV tubes are waste no more, as they are ground up and poured into the mix. Professor Francesco Veglio: “You could visualise our process as a bit like making coffee in the morning. We call this operation leaching. Water going through a solid that makes the coffee soluble. “Of course to help the recuperation of this element, for example as with the Yttrium that we find in this powder, we add chemical reagents that make this operation possible.” The end results may look like sludge, but in fact Yttrium is a crucial element for …