The consortium of organisations – comprising of Aberdeen-based environmental tech company SEM, waste services provider WEEE Scotland, the University of Edinburgh and the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC) – has proven the feasibility of a more sustainable method for recovering reusable scrap metal from products such as TVs and laptops.
Current physical and chemical extraction techniques are energy intensive or use solvents that are difficult to recycle to dissolve valuable metals from electronic circuit boards. The latter process generates large volumes of acidic liquid waste containing traces of metals, which can be damaging to the environment.
The new method developed by the group uses recyclable solvents to extract valuable gold and copper from printed circuit boards. Other metals – such as aluminium, tin and zinc – can then be recovered separately from the effluent using SEM’s ‘Dram’ filtration system, making the discharge from the...