New Project to Extract Precious Metals from End-of-Life Mobile Phones

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): The new project launched by researchers at France’s University of Lorraine targets to collect discarded mobile phones in bulk quantities in order to extract and recycle precious metals including gold, silver, copper and palladium, which otherwise could end up in causing environmental damage.

The project, launched earlier this year, aims to collect around 10,000 used mobile phone devices before February next year. It urged residents of the Grand Est region to drop off their old mobile phones at designated collection points, located in many places across the town, including Nancy, Metz and Troyes. All the collected phones will be recycled in a responsible manner so as to extract valuable precious metals out of them.

The R&D project will run for a period of three years, at the end of which, it will build a treatment facility in Grant Est. The ultimate aim is to establish a full-fledged e-scrap recycling facility in the region.

As per estimates, only around 6-9 million out of the 20 million phones bought last year were recycled in France. Also, around 100 million phones are believed to be idle lying in households. These contain thousands of tonnes of precious metals trapped in them, which could be recovered and reused.

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