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HYDROCHEMICAL ROUTES TO RECYCLE
NIMH BATTERIES AND FLUORESCENT
LAMPS
Professor Christian Ekberg
www.inl.gov
Nuclear Chemistry and Industrial Materials Recycling, Department of Chemistry and Chemical
Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden
It is clear that with the exception of energy, the availability of raw materials,
especially minerals, will be one of the big questions for the continuous
development of the world from this point on. Many of the minerals and
elements we are heavily dependent on today are running scarce and their
mining is sometimes questionable from both environmental and ethical points
of view. Seen in this context recycling has become more and more interesting.
Many of the materials we use today can be rather efficiently recycled if they
are collected and sorted in the right way. In this paper we will focus on two
fairly concentrated secondary mineral sources: the used NiMH batteries from
hybrid electric vehicles and the fluorescent lamp wastes. We focus our
investigations on collected material since in Sweden the sorting facilities and
the societal commitment to waste handling is rather efficient. This provides a
fairly uniform stream of waste material to be handled in the recycling facility.
This paper gives an account on both the dismantling as well as the recovery of
the metals and their separation into pure streams ready for reuse into the
society replacing virgin material. For these two cases processes have been
developed to pilot plant scale.
When:
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January 5, 2016
CAES Auditorium
10:30 AM
Interested Employees