VATIS UPDATE Article

University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, is soon going to unveil a pilot micro-factory that safely transforms toxic electronic waste (e-waste) into high value metal alloys, offering a unique low-cost solution to one of the world’s fastest-growing waste burdens. The breakthrough new process, invented by UNSW Professor Veena Sahajwalla, recovers the considerable wealth of resources embedded in e-waste while overcoming the challenges of toxicity and the often prohibitively high costs of conventional industrial-scale recycling.

Professor Sahajwalla’s solution will enable the safe, cost-effective ‘mining’ of e-waste stockpiles locally, anywhere in the world. Professor Sahajwalla uses precisely controlled high-temperature reactions to produce copper and tin-based alloys from waste printed circuit boards (PCBs), while simultaneously destroying toxins. A programmed drone is able to identify PCBs from within crushed e-waste, and a simple robot is used to extract them, overcoming the risks of contamination, before the PCBs are fed into the furnace.

“A tonne of mobile phones (about 6,000 handsets), for example, contains about 130kg of copper, 3.5kg of silver, 340 grams of gold and 140 grams of palladium, worth tens of thousands of dollars,” said Sahajwalla. The new micro-factories are suitable for mobile use: they can be set up in containers and transported to waste sites, avoiding the huge costs and emissions of trucking or shipping e-waste over long distances. Likewise, they promise a safe new way for poor communities in developing nations to generate an income from the production of metal alloys.