The Eurecat technology centre has tested new technologies to recover and valorise strategic raw materials including lithium, magnesium, nickel and cobalt from waste and by-products to help secure their supply, avert the environmental impact of their mining and support decarbonising industry by fostering the circular economy.
Critical raw materials (CRM) are crucial to economic activity since they are used to produce a broad range of goods and modern technology in the automotive industry, renewable energy and other sectors. These materials are considered critical because supplies of them are not always guaranteed.
“Critical raw materials are scarce resources and access to them once they have been mined is a strategic issue for Europe which involves recovering them with technologies that promote the circular economy and ensure they are available,” says Miquel Rovira, director of Eurecat’s Sustainability Area. “At Eurecat we are also striving to lessen dependence on them by seeking out substitutes while reducing the quantities used.”
Furthermore, “critical materials are essential in decarbonising mobility and eliminating greenhouse gas emissions which will help to enhance air quality and people’s health.”
Valorising critical raw materials in waste
Given this economic and social challenge, Eurecat has developed tools and technologies to extract these materials from new sources coupled with technological solutions which enable companies to control, recover and valorise critical raw materials from waste so as to gain maximum value from secondary sources which are currently unused.
In the search for new sources of critical raw materials, Eurecat is taking part in developing a new process for recovering high-value materials and minerals such as lithium and magnesium from effluent generated by seawater desalination plants.
These technologies rolled out in the European Sea4Value project make desalination more sustainable by lessening the negative impact of the hypersaline concentrate they generate and using part of this brine as a sustainable source to extract minerals in the seas and oceans and thus obtain valuable raw materials.
The technology centre has also supported more cost-effective and sustainable hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical processes to enable the recovery of critical raw materials from waste.
Eurecat has tested and developed new sustainable hydrometallurgy processes harnessing reagents and processes with a lower environmental impact and better payback to recover valuable products and strategic raw materials including lithium, manganese, nickel and cobalt from electronic waste and batteries.
It has also put in place a microwave plasma spheroidisation system for recovering powdered or waste material from manufacturing processes for reuse in industrial operations.
The Eurecat technology centre additionally runs a pilot plant which produces powdered metals in a centrifugal atomisation process for recovering and recycling iron alloys. The plant can make customised powder on demand either with high-purity raw materials or from recovered scrap metal.
Strategic materials, key to decarbonising mobility
As businesses working with critical raw materials shift towards the circular economy, they can estimate the economic feasibility of recovering materials in waste from, for example, the mining, metalworking, automotive and e-waste industries with a new Eurecat tool which calculates which options are most viable for valorisation.
Moreover, these strategic materials are crucial in manufacturing parts and batteries for electric vehicles.
Here Eurecat is coordinating the Salema project which draws on a circular economy model using waste and scrap as an alternative source of critical raw materials while also replacing them with aluminium alloy components for electric vehicles.
The project is running four industrial pilot schemes to validate new aluminium alloys with five demonstrations of car parts in five industrial case studies.
The technology centre is also engaged in the European FREE4LIB project which targets developing sustainable and efficient technology for dismantling, pre-treatment and materials recovery in end-of-life lithium-ion battery recycling.
