bifa Umweltinstitut: Waste streams containing precious and special metals

Special metals such as neodymium or indium especially are not recovered from waste or only to a very limited extent. There is also still potential for more recovery of precious metals contained in waste.

This has several causes. There is still no industrial scale recycling method for several special metals in Germany. The concentration or total quantity of the metals installed in end-of-life products or components is often so low that collection or separation from waste streams is currently not economically viable. There are also information deficits in some cases regarding use of the metals and their separation, especially among recovery companies.

The objective of the bifa research project funded by the Federal Environmental Agency is to develop concepts for controlling suitable waste streams, which enable increased recovery of selected precious and special metals relevant from an environmental policy perspective.

To achieve this, new types of logistics concepts and options for the intelligent organisation and design of material and information flows are to be developed for selected waste streams. The temporary storage of waste containing special metals, for which industrial processes are still in the development phase, is to be specified in greater detail and checked with regard to the legal position. Using the example of selected waste streams, an ecologically optimum degree of recovery is to be estimated. Practical players along the recovery chain will be involved with four workshops and then proposals will be drawn up for implementing the concepts in recycling practice.

The law firm avocado and the optimisation and operations management research group of Augsburg University of Applied Sciences (HSAOps) are assisting bifa with the project. The project work will be completed in March 2018.