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Europe imports nickel from Indonesia, refines it, uses it - and then throws half of it into a landfill without it ever doing a single day of work. Marco Bersani's company gets paid to take that metal back out of the water.
Marco Bersani is CEO and Co-Founder of Circular Materials, an Italian company recovering critical metals from industrial wastewater using SWaP (Supercritical Water Precipitation), a metal-agnostic process that precipitates better than 99.9% of dissolved metals into a fine powder. The European Commission named it a Strategic Project under the Critical Raw Materials Act. Hosts Dustin Olsen and Daniel O'Connor dig into the grade of the resource, why nobody else has gone after it, the dual-revenue model that makes metal prices almost irrelevant, and the plan to bring three or four sites to the United States.
In this episode:
- Why industrial wastewater carries 1-10% metal content (10,000-100,000 ppm) when miners dream of a fraction of a percent
- How Circular Materials gets paid hundreds of euros to take 100 kg of dissolved nickel, instead of buying feedstock like every other recycler
- Europe loses an estimated 12,000-15,000 tonnes of mixed critical metals a year this way, and the US market looks three to four times larger
- Recovery rates today: roughly 70% for non-gold precious metals, and well below 5% for non-precious metals
- Copper, nickel and chromium are the triad, plus a large position in the very small ruthenium market
- Why the major wastewater engineering firms reclaim water but not metal, and why customers asked for this as a service rather than a licensed technology
- What it actually took to earn EU Strategic Project status under the Critical Raw Materials Act
Guest: Marco Bersani, CEO & Co-Founder, Circular Materials s.r.l.
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