Australian Company Promoting Method to Increase Recycling in Scrapped Autos

CSIRO Minerals, an Australian company that performs research to develop business solutions for government and industry, has developed a method to reduce waste from car recycling. The company is touting a method to extract more recyclables from the waste stream generated when recycling automobiles.

According to the company the method focuses on using minerals processing techniques to extract more recyclable metal from the sludge.

According to Warren Bruckard, a spokesman for CSIRO, "We found every metric ton of dry sludge contained about 3.1kg of recoverable copper and about 33kg of clean steel.”

"While it's good to recycle as much as we can, the recovered materials are fairly low in value and so any process we develop needs to be simple and cheap."

The method developed involves using a sorting process to remove plastic, rubber and other low-density, non-metallic stuff, then magnetic separation to recover clean steel, and finally a gravity technique to separate low-density materials like glass from high-density metals like copper, lead and brass.

The full story can be found in the February issue of Process.