He talked about how to treat the possibility of obtaining valuable secondary raw materials from used electrical and electronic equipment at 16. Conference ZSEiE ABRYS Bartosz Kubicki, President of the Management Board of Elektrorecykling, a company that has a ZSEiE processing plant and in which the principles of so-called urban mining are applied.
- Urban mining is, in short, digging up what has already been dug up once. Where for some the product ends, for us its second, precious life begins. Let us remember that in order to obtain one tonne of copper, it is necessary to process between 100 and 200 tonnes of ore. However, if we use urban mining, i.e. "digging up" raw materials from used electrical and electronic equipment, we need only 20% of the energy we would use for the traditional extraction of this metal – explained Bartosz Kubicki.
However, WEEE does include copper and many other rare metals, such as palladium, which is currently mined at a global rate of 44% in Russia. We all know what the situation is at the moment regarding imports of raw materials from that country. Fortunately, changes are taking place as a result of which already 30% of the metals used in production are returned to the market and reused. The most important question is whether today's producers of electrical and electronic equipment are ready to apply our solutions - added Bartosz Kubicki.
