NIMS Develops Small Device for Extracting Rare Metals from Urban Mines

The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) announced on December 17, 2009, that it has succeeded in developing a small-scale crusher for disintegrating electronic devices and a three-dimensional ball mill for crushing chips and plating on boards. The devices were designed to extract rare metals from used electronics. NIMS collaborated with the semiconductor equipment maker Oshigane Ltd. and the ball mill maker Nagao System Ltd. to develop a method for collecting rare metals, as announced on November 2008.

The crusher applies a twisting force to the electronics to disintegrate them while allowing the shape of many parts remain intact, enabling operators to remove specific parts for the next process. The high-speed ball mill allows the operators to efficiently extract rare metal parts by separating and crushing chips and plating from the board.
For collection of rare metals, lower disposal costs are necessary, as the value contained in a mobile phone is only about 100 yen (about U.S.$1). The extraction devices are small, sophisticated and suitable for dispersed processing at local cities, thus paving the way for the more widespread use of "urban mines."

NIMS Develops Simplified Method to Recover Rare Metals from Urban Mine (Related JFS article)
http://www.japanfs.org/en/pages/028877.html
Could Japan Be Rich in Resources? Exploiting the 'Urban Mine' Effectively
http://www.japanfs.org/en/mailmagazine/newsletter/pages/
027844.html
Innovative High Performance Cell Phone Recycling Technology
http://www.nims.go.jp/eng/news/press/2009/12/
p200912170.html

Posted: 2010/04/23 06:00:15 AM