Metals Archives - Transfire

The Aluminium Action Plan: Charting a Sustainable Path Forward

The aluminium industry, with its extensive global influence and importance, finds itself at a crucial crossroads. Recognising the vast potential of this metal in the shift towards a circular economy, the Aluminium Action Plan was devised. This thorough plan provides a distinct direction for the future of the aluminium industry in the UK, underscoring its endless recyclability and the nation's aspiration for sustainable growth. The Action Plan is the fruit of in-depth consultations with UK industry, government, and academia. It sketches a strategic roadmap, detailing short, medium, and long-term goals. These span from immediate actions to address current shortcomings to transformative steps intended to revamp the system entirely. The plan's primary areas of focus encompass circular design, recovery, and business models: Circular Design: This pertains to the creation of products designed for straightforward disassembly, reuse, or recycling. By adopting a circular mindset in design, the industry can ensure products [...]

The Royal Mint’s Journey in Electronic Waste Management

TransFIRe researcher, Dr Masoud Ahmadinia, has recently finished a project working with The Royal Mint on their innovative initiative to extract precious metals from the circuit boards of electronic waste, such as laptops and mobile phones, in order to create an eco-friendly jewellery line. The Royal Mint is working in collaboration with Excir, a Canadian clean tech start-up, to use their patented technology, based on revolutionary chemistry and aims to leverage advanced technologies and innovative methodologies to enhance the extraction process. As part of a secondment, Dr Ahmadinia spent a number of days embedded within The Royal Mint, after which, a range of documentation and analysis was produced. These included a Sankey diagram, visually representing the material and energy flow of the processes involved in order to understand their efficiency and identify potential opportunities, as well as a comprehensive cost analysis report for the energy use of processes. As [...]