Urban mining

Urban mining

Gold, Silver, Tantalum, Palladium, Copper, Aluminium … With up to 40 metals contained in electronic assemblies, e-waste can be seen as the future mining to avoid extraction out of ground, Continue Reading →
New industrial process

New industrial process

The amount of WEEE (Waste of electric and electronic equipment) thrown away is increasing by around 20% each year, making it the fastest growing waste stream in Europe. Today, still Continue Reading →
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NIREA TM is an European Commission supported project for New Industrial Recovery of Electronic AssembliesThe NIREA TM recycling solution is a low-cost, environmental friendly and highly flexible process aimed at retrieving the maximum value from medium or low graded End-of-Life Printed Circuit Boards batches while offering the best possible compromise from an overall life-cycle point of view. It does not make any use of chemical reagent or thermal techniques but rely on the implementation of a smart and innovative mechanical separation process which takes place after the e-wastes are grinded into powders at the micron range. An on-line characterisation measurement allows to adapt the separation process strategy as a function of each batch materials’ constitution.

Ressource rarefaction

Ressource rarefaction
Resources rarefaction, environmental impacts, geopolitics, increasing consumption of electronics, and more and more efficient organizations for collecting waste streams create additional incentives for managing the end-of-life electronic products as key resources, thus moving into the spotlight the need for affordable, Continue Reading →

Increasing waste amount

Increasing waste amount
The amount of WEEE (Waste of electric and electronic equipment) thrown away is increasing by around 20% each year, making it the fastest growing waste stream in Europe. Today, still more than 80% of these WEEE end up in landfills, in rich and developing countries alike, where the lead and other toxins it contains can cause Continue Reading →

Lack of industrial solution

Lack of industrial solution
In the past years, high performance capabilities have been built based on hydro- or pyro-metallurgy processes which can recover more than 20 precious and other non-ferrous metals from a wide range of input materials. However, with their costs of several hundreds of millions Euros, their high energetic processes Continue Reading →