Heraeus to build precious metals recycling plant in China

German company’s news follows May 2018 expansion of plant in Tennessee.


Germany-based Heraeus Group has announced plans to open a precious metals refinery and recycling plant in Nanjing, China. The company intends to capitalize on China’s rising demand for platinum group metals (PGMs), according to Reuters. The firm plans to spend $100 million on the facility, which is expected to open by the third quarter of this year.

In late May 2018, the company held a ribbon-cutting ceremony with customers and government officials to celebrate the completion of a 30,000 square-foot expansion of its Wartburg, Tennessee, facility in the United States.

That multimillion-dollar expansion project, which began in the spring of 2016, increased the Tennessee plant’s preprocessing capacity to meet what Heraeus calls growing demand from customers in the chemical, electronics, automotive and jewelry industries. Established in 2004, the Heraeus Wartburg plant is a treatment and storage facility for both hazardous and non-hazardous materials containing precious metals.

“Processing and recovering precious metals has become extremely complex,” says Andre Christl, president of Heraeus Precious Metals. He continues, “But today we have a state-of-the-art facility and a world-class team of talented employees at Wartburg to meet our customers’ recycling challenges.”

A pyrometallurgical recycling converter in Wartburg employs a process to recover precious metals faster and more economically, according to Heraeus. The converter focuses on the recovery of PGMs. In addition to the investments in the physical plant, technology and capital equipment, Heraeus says it created nearly 20 new jobs at Wartburg with the goal of creating additional positions as recycling demand grows.

The investment and expansion in Wartburg is part of the what company calls its global effort to “strengthen its position as the world leader in precious metals across the entire life cycle.” With a network of trading offices, processing facilities and recycling sites in Germany, Switzerland, China, South Africa, India, Hong Kong and the United States, Heraeus bills itself as “the only true worldwide precious metal company serving the global market.”

In the Reuters article, Andre Christl, president of Heraeus Precious Metals, comments, “Demand is very strong in China, especially for PGMs. We already have some refining capacity in China, [but] with higher demands expected, we’ve decided to consolidate and expand those into one big factory where we can do refining [and create] chemical products.”