Swindon, UK based Tetronics Ltd. has formed a partnership with Taiwan based Solar Applied Materials Technology Corp., to investigate the potential to use plasma technology for the extraction of valuable metals from Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) sources across a number of countries in the far east.
Tetronics, a supplier of Direct Current (DC) plasma waste recovery plants for the treatment of hazardous waste and metal recovery, says that it entered the partnership with Applied Materials Technology Corp - a specialist in precious metal and rare material refining - in order to recover precious metals including Platinum Group Metals (PGMs).
Whilst PGMs are found as naturally occurring ores, these metals may also be obtained by recycling PGM bearing wastes, such as as WEEE. Tetronics claims that when recycled, these waste streams are typically many orders of magnitude richer in PGMs than their naturally occurring ore equivalents,
According to the company the supply of the first plasma plant to Taiwan is now underway. The technology will extract valuable precious metals including; gold, silver and platinum from electrical waste, as well as industrial and automotive catalysts.
The plasma technology is claimed to also destroy any hazardous organic material such as dioxins that may be contained within the waste material.
Tetronics says that the process chemistry in its plasma recovery technology is designed to symbiotically and preferentially separate and recover the valuable material in electronic waste, whilst destroying any hazardous components.
The remaining non-valuable material is vitrified into an inert, safe disposable non-hazardous material, called Plasmarok, in a single processing step.
Dr Ma, Chief Operating Officer for Solar explains: “We are not simply buying a plasma solution, we are more importantly building on an already strong partnership with Tetronics that will see us leveraging other spent catalyst and related opportunities in Taiwan, China and further afield.”
