Despite the urge for the European Union to secure and sustain its access to base, precious and critical metals, poly-metallic concentrates recovered from shredder residues (from ELVs, WEEE, collection scraps, etc) are typically processed by pyrometallurgical processes. Nevertheless, these processes are often not adapted for that kind of heterogeneous polymetallic concentrates. Most of the critical metals (for example gallium and indium) and rare earth metals are lost by dissemination in the slags. Recent advances in hydrometallurgy open tangible possibilities to improve the base metal recovery and allow the valorization of these strategic metals.
BIOLIX aims to scale up the beneficiation of polymetallic shredding residues by using bacterially assisted leaching system resulting directly from a prior high competivity R&D project supported by the Walloon Government (PHOENIX project), which allows the selective recovery of base metal while concentrating precious and critical metals as well as rare earth metals into enriched substrates.
Compared to Best Available Technologies, BIOLIX has numerous economic and environmental benefits such as significant reduction of primary resources extraction, improvement of recycling efficiency and reduction of CO2 emissions.