Mint Innovation Saves Valuable Metal from E-Waste

Our “throwaway” culture often means consumers are guilty of getting rid of old devices as soon as new ones come to the market, a habit that can have a significant effect on waste streams and the environment, Anmar Frangoul writes for CNBC. Some companies, like Auckland clean tech firm Mint Innovation, are now turning to chemistry to develop solutions to recycle items like old cell phones, extracting value at the same time.

“We’ve developed a biological process for recovering valuable metals [like gold] from weird and wonderful feedstocks, such as electronic waste,” Ollie Crush, Mint Innovation’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC’s ‘Sustainable Energy’.

Crush explained that Mint Innovation’s system involved taking scrap material and “grinding it up into a sand like consistency.”

“The future for Mint Innovation is to prove that our technology works with a number of different feedstocks,” Crush said.

“We’ve already shown that it works with electronic scrap, and we’re now beginning to research recovery in palladium and other metals from scrap automotive catalytic converters,” he added, explaining that a wide range of potential “feedstocks” existed.

Original article by Anmar Frangoul, CNBC, October 2, 2020.