Metal sourcing and recovery technology company Metallium, originally based in Texas, recently secured two new U.S. sites for electronic waste processing: one in Westport, Massachusetts, and one in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
According to Waste360, both regions generate large volumes of electronic waste, making them apt locations for metal processing. Each site is colocated with a scrap yard, and considering each facility’s immense power capacity, can process over 20,000 tons of metal waste each month.
At these two new locations, Metallium intends to deploy Flash Joule Heating technology — a form of direct resistance heating through the discharge of rapid electrical pulses, as explained in a study in the Nature Reviews Clean Technology journal — to extract and process the metal from e-waste.
Both sites have obtained the required permits for industrial waste at both the federal and state levels, per Waste360, which speeds up the process of putting these recycling facilities into active operation.
The World Health Organization reported e-waste as “one of the fastest-growing solid waste streams in the world,” dubbing it a growing concern for our planet’s pollution content. Globally, over 60 million metric tons of e-waste is generated each year, but only a small proportion is properly recycled and processed. The remainder, unfortunately, are subject to environmentally unfriendly and even unsafe methods of disposal, ranging from landfill dumping to open burning.
When improperly disposed of, the toxins in e-waste scraps can contaminate soil, groundwater, and air, eventually finding their way into our bodies and potentially affecting our health for the worse.
But safely handling these hazardous materials can pose a challenge, and conventional methods — such as smelting, which relies on extreme heat to extract the necessary metals and minerals — are often pollution-heavy and demanding on our planet. Flash Joule Heating, by contrast, imposes less of an environmental strain, using less combustion-based energy to transform electronic scraps into recyclables.
As a result, while our e-waste production continues to grow with our booming electronics industry, recycling facilities like the latest Metallium plants can help us navigate the colossal buildup while aiming to keep our planet-heating pollution to a minimum.
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