A Teesside business will use “urban mining” to recycle precious metals from discarded gadgets.
The DEScycle demonstration plant will recover gold, silver, copper and palladium from products like laptops and mobile phones.
The metals are crucial to the production of consumer electronics, cars and the hardware needed in AI data centres.
It comes after the government announced a £50m investment plan at The Wilton Centre, in Redcar, aimed at securing the UK’s supply and becoming less reliant on imports.
DEScycle’s co-founder and chief commercial officer Fred White said its mission was to “transform domestic waste streams into sovereign supply”.
“We call this concept urban mining,” he explained.
“The UK is geology poor but actually waste rich, we produce one of the highest amounts of electronic waste globally – phones, laptops, televisions, even things like fridges and toys.
“All of those devices contain valuable metals like copper, tin, silver and gold – these are critical resources and they mostly end up in landfill.”
The government’s Critical Minerals Strategy sets an ambition for recycling, external to meet 20% of annual UK critical mineral demand by 2035.
