New recovery tech could cut reliance on critical metals imports – DEScycle chair

➤ Advancing metals recovery technology will mitigate battery supply chain risks for major demand hubs, according to DEScycle.

➤ E-waste is an $83 billion "low-hanging fruit" that could yield precious and critical metals such as gold, copper, silver, nickel and rare earths.

➤ Miners stand to add billions to their market capitalizations by extracting just 10% more metals out of their tailings waste.

DEScycle independent nonexecutive chairman Ian Cockerill. Source: DEScycle

Recovering metals from electronic waste would help mitigate battery supply chain risks for major demand hubs that lack domestic metals resources, according to London-based technology company DEScycle.

DEScycle is initially targeting e-waste recycling to replace carbon-intensive smelters. Eventually it wants to develop gold extraction processes that no longer rely on cyanide and toxic solvents and to replace high pressure acid leaching for battery metals such as nickel and cobalt with a capital-light process using deep eutectic solvents (DES). DES are used to extract valuable metals from various chemistries.

Ian Cockerill, who is on the boards of mining giants BHP Group Ltd. and Endeavour Mining PLC and battery metals supply chain players Cornish Lithium Ltd. and I-Pulse Inc., was appointed independent nonexecutive chairman of DEScycle in September.

S&P Global Commodity Insights interviewed Cockerill about the technology's evolution and where it fits into the broader metals recycling market amid the clean energy transition. The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and space.

S&P Global Commodity Insights: How did this metals recycling company come about?

Ian Cockerill: Well, it's not a recycling company as such; it's an innovative technology business. The fact that recycling is a potential beneficiary of this technology is actually quite serendipitous.

This whole thing started back in the mid-2000s when a friend of mine said he'd seen work out of the University of Leicester in the UK working on a process to extract gold but not using cyanide, and they came up with this innovative technology using DES, which have the ability to selectively extract metals from ore.

We started out successfully extracting gold using this technology, then we asked what was the best resource to apply it to. That ended up being electronic waste (e-waste), one of the highest-grade resources of gold in the world. Only about 20% of the intrinsic metal value e-waste currently gets recycled. The other 80% just gets crushed and buried and locked away, which seems a shocking waste.

Unlike conventional recycling of e-waste, which is through smelters with high energy, high heat and lots of toxic fumes coming out, our technology is low energy, done at atmospheric pressure and doesn't produce any harmful byproducts.

The timing is right, and having started in gold, we have now proven applicability across nearly all metals in the periodic table that we can selectively extract, including nickel and cobalt, and we've played around with a little bit of rare earths.

Who will be your clients?

Initially, clients will be in the IT space — the server farms, recyclers, people who are currently the recipients of e-waste scrap who are conventionally extracting metals through pyro technology or literally just burning stuff.

Far too much metal ends up unnecessarily in landfills, and a lot of that can be recycled. The real benefit of this technology is that any country that has zero natural resources but produces lots of waste, chances are that they could start to source a reasonable degree of critical metals and not be entirely dependent on long supply chains coming out from Australia, Africa or anywhere else.

I don't think there's enough material around to recycle to completely replace mining, but I do believe that we as a civilization need to do a lot more to cut our footprint on the earth. This technology goes a long way toward enabling us to do that, but importantly to do it in an environmentally friendly way.

DEScycle's lab pilot program at the Centre for Process Innovation's technology center in Darlington, UK. Source: DEScycle

So when are you going to be ready?

We are now TRL6 — a technology readiness level definition that means we have a working prototype and have shown that the process works. We know that we can dissolve the metal and extract the metal. TRL7 is where we show the process from start to finish at a larger scale. In other words, you've got crushed material, [you] dissolve it, then extract the metals out sequentially, and ultimately run it through various solutions.

By the end of 2024, we will do it on a 1,000-liter basis with bigger equipment and you can see the whole process from start to finish. That plant will be aimed at answering questions around scaling up a 5,000 metric tons per year plant, which we're planning in Gateshead in England's north by 2026.

If you forget scrap recycling for steel, copper and all that sort of thing, at the moment there is about $50 billion a year of intrinsic value of metal in e-waste. By 2030, that's going to be about $83 billion. Given our predisposition to consistently want every three or four years a brand new phone, that market won't get any smaller.

Our modeling has shown that by the late 2030s, even if we only process under 2% of a market of that size, we will be looking at somewhere in the order of about $1.5 billion a year of revenue on this business from about four or five plants placed globally. It's a very significant business.

Does this have implications for miners who could extract more metals from their tailings, as well as the e-waste potential?

Down the road, absolutely. Due to limited resources, we are building a business by concentrating initially on the low-hanging fruit of e-waste where there is significant supply of certain critical metals available. But in parallel, we're talking with various mining companies, [and we've] taken some of their primary ores and extracted key metals in a way that gets a far greater recovery percentage than from conventional mining.

The obvious example is if you've got an inefficient process: Instead of getting 70% recovery with 30% going to tailings, how much of that 30% sitting in tailings can we get out using this technology? So you increase your overall recovery without impacting on your existing plant.

Say a company is producing 100,000 metric tons a year of a product worth $10,000/t. If you can increase recovery by 10% to go to 110,000 metric tons, you get an additional 10,000 metric tons at $10,000/t of value; that's $100 million of additional revenue. For most mining companies, that's not far short of $1 billion of additional potential market cap on that business. That's a very significant value in wholesale to a company. So enhancing in your recovery adds massive value to the intrinsic value of the company.

S&P Global Commodity Insights produces content for distribution on S&P Capital IQ Pro.