Company mining e-waste gets Govt grant from landfill levy

Monday, 28 May 2018

A UN body says 44 million tonnes of e-waste was generated last year.

The Government has made its first financial commitment towards finding a solution to recycle old technology.

Auckland company Mint Innovation has created a way to extract valuable metals like gold from mobile phones and computers, and has received $80,000 from the Government to calculate the value of rolling out its solution.

Its study was funded from the Waste Minimisation Fund – the pool of money created by the $10 per tonne fee charged at landfills.

Finding a solution to recycle e-waste is a priority, Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage says.

Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage announced the study on Monday. Fixing e-waste was her priority as minister, she said earlier this year.

**READ MORE:

A United Nations-funded report named and shamed New Zealand as one of the worst producers of E-waste in December.

* E-waste a 'priority issue' promises associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage

* Recycling industry scrambles to solve our dirty waste secret**

A United Nations-funded report by the International Telecommunications Union named and shamed New Zealand as a large producer of e-waste in December.

Sage said New Zealand was lagging behind in its efforts to recycle technology and there was support for Government intervention.

Electronic goods ending up in landfill was a 'major environmental hazard,' she said.

'Heavy metals and toxic chemicals can leach from landfills into soil and waterways, harming aquatic life and posing a threat to human health.'

Mint Innovation chief executive Will Barker said New Zealand threw out almost 100,000 tonnes of electronic goods annually.

He said Mint's metal recovery technology could extract up to 600 kilograms of gold and 600 tonnes of copper from the e-waste sitting in landfills.

To do that, Barker said Mint would build the world's first factory specifically for extracting valuable metals from e-waste in Auckland after the study was published.

It would partner with technology recycling company Remarkit Solutions to build the factory. Remarkit started the television recycling scheme TV TakeBack.

Recycling firm Astron Plastics received $500,000 from the fund last week.

Sage said Astron would use the money to expand its Auckland facility, adding new machines to recycle type two and four plastic that were typically difficult to process.