At an electronics recycling plant in Singapore’s Tuas industrial zone, tons of electronic wastes are fed to the facility for the recovery of materials like steel, copper, plastic, and also silver and gold.
The concentration of some precious metals in the electronic wastes is higher than ore found in mines, said Fons Krist, executive director for sales and marketing at Cimelia Resource Recovery Pte Ltd, which operates the plant.
Krist said the company typically expects about 150 grams of gold to be recovered from a ton of printed circuit boards — mostly from old computers, hard drives and other equipment.
“It is an interesting industry and it is still a growing industry, with electronic scrap being the fastest growing solid waste stream in the world,” he said in an interview with Xinhua ahead of the inaugural CleanEnviro Summit Singapore, which gathers industry players from the region and beyond on July 1-5.
“Electronic recycling is dubbed urban mining. It is kind of silly not to recycle and re-use it,” Krist said. “But it has to be done properly.”
GROWING INDUSTRY
Built on a land of about 200,000 square feet, the plant of Cimelia is one of the largest electronic waste management and precious metal recovery plant in Singapore. Krist, who has been working in the industry for more than 10 years, said there are some other firms in the business but few others go so far as to be able to recover physical precious metals like gold, silver, platinum and paladium.
Cimelia also participated in the ongoing CleanEnviro Summit Singapore, which is held concurrently with the Singapore International Water Week and the World Cities Summit.
The management and recovery of waste, as urbanization accelerates around the world, is creating unprecedented challenges, but it also creates opportunities as solutions that had not been possible in the past constantly emerge, said Matthew Gubb, director of the International Environmental Technology Center, the United Nations Environment Program, at a panel discussion at the CleanEnviro Summit Singapore.
About 80 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, up from the current 50 percent, said Jerome Le Conte, chief executive officer of France-based Veolia Environmental Services.
Veolia is one of the leading industry players in Singapore, offering solid waste collection and industrial services and operating a material recovery facility and some hazardous waste treatment facilities. The company provides lithium battery recycling that meets regulatory requirements, which is of great potential given the increasing popularity of electric cars, said Le Conte.
Dowa Eco-System, a Japan-based company that has waste management and recycling operations across Asia, also operates a plant in Singapore to recover precious and nonferrous metals.
Source: Waste Management World