Essential elements

Elemental Holding SA, Luxembourg, has announced a number of developments in the last few years that have ranged from acquisitions to investments in greenfield recycling facilities to strategic partnerships and equity investments. All are intended to help the company continue to scale its global urban mining and recycling operations.

Established in 2010 in Poland, Elemental is focused on extracting platinum group metals (PGMs), such as palladium, platinum and rhodium, from spent automotive catalysts and gold, silver and copper concentrate from end-of-life electronics and printed circuit boards. It’s also investing in a PGM smelter and refinery in Zawiercie, Poland, and has formed strategic partnerships with this facility in mind.

Strategic partnerships

At the start of this year, Elemental announced its PGM recycling strategic partnership with Mitsubishi Corp., headquartered in Japan, to deliver green and sustainable PGMs to customers through Elemental’s integrated PGM recycling production chain. Mitsubishi also is providing financial resources to support the ramp-up of Elemental’s PGM smelter and refinery in Zawiercie, as well as an equity investment in Elemental’s operating subsidiary in the United States.

Photo courtesy of Elemental Holding 

“Mitsubishi is a leading global PGM seller and will be able to add significant value to our business through its marketing expertise, global network, business capacity and reputation,” Elemental Holding founder and CEO Pawel Jarski tells Recycling Today. “Working closely with Mitsubishi will increase our potential to increase the supply of critical recycled raw materials both in the European Union and beyond.”

Elemental is launching what Jarski describes as its “integrated PGM steelworks/refinery” in Zawiercie, saying it will significantly increase the European Union’s raw material independence.

“By applying an integrated production chain in PGM recycling, the Elemental-Mitsubishi partnership will strive to provide customers with platinum group metals produced most sustainably,” Jarski says. “Through the announced collaboration, Elemental and Mitsubishi will combine expertise and resources in the collection and preprocessing of used automotive catalytic converters and the smelting, refining and remarketing of purified metal.”

Koichiro Takagi, chief operating officer of Mitsubishi’s Mineral Resources Trading Division, describes Elemental as “a highly respected and skilled global supplier of recycled PGM” in the news release about the companies’ partnership. “This partnership will help us strengthen our supply chain and underpin our ability to deliver green PGM for the growing demand of PGM, including from the hydrogen economy. We also view this partnership as a potential step to expand our partnership with Elemental in the recycling business of other critical minerals, such as base metals and battery metals on a global basis.”

Jarski says Elemental’s list of business partners in Poland has expanded to include Huawei, a global provider of information and communications technology infrastructure and smart devices that is headquartered in Shenzhen, China. “The signed agreement is intended to combine the knowledge and resources of our companies in the collection and processing of used li-ion batteries and waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) and then recover strategic metals from them at the enterprise in Zawiercie,” he says.

Investing in growth

Mitsubishi’s investment in Elemental follows the recycling company’s completion of a $290 million equity private placement from a group of international financial institutions led by the World Bank’s International Finance Corp. (IFC), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Polish Development Fund S.A. (PFR) that was announced in early 2023.

Elemental says the equity private placement was an important step toward securing more than $500 million in growth capital, including project finance debt and grants from the European Union. This capital will help fund its growth projects, accelerate its global acquisition strategy and secure funding for general corporate purposes.

Regarding Elemental’s investment in Zawiercie, Jarski describes it as “a huge undertaking” and “the answer to our business needs.”

“Our hard work and the involvement of many parties meant that we built the plant in just over a year and a half. It was not an easy process—environmental arrangements and negotiations with the local community are really complicated.”

The investment in Zawiercie will allow Elemental to expand its recycling capabilities for catalytic converters, taking it beyond mechanical processing, or the grinding and separation of these devices, Jarski says, to melting catalysts and refining them into pure metal.

“The new factory will also provide us with dynamic development in the field of lithium-ion batteries, the recycling processes of which are still not well-understood,” he says. “Thanks to our research and development facilities, we want to meet these challenges.”

Jarski adds that Elemental has invested 150 million euros, or $161.6 million, in the project, which is part of the pan-European IPCEI (Important Projects of Common European Interest) program.

Since 2018, the European Commission has approved state aid for at least one integrated IPCEI project annually related to research and development or first industrial deployment.

In addition to its plans in Zawiercie, Elemental’s Terra Electrorecycling business opened a new hall for processing refrigerators and electronics in Grodzisk Mazowiecki, Poland. The plant, built by the German company URT, can process up to 100 refrigerators per hour, regardless of the type of refrigerant used, while older technology allows 60 Freon refrigerators or 30 pentane refrigerators to be processed in the same time. These appliances then will be shredded, while other e-scrap will be dismantled manually. The plant has a targeted capacity of 70,000 tons of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) per year, 200,000 tons of which will be refrigerators.

The company also has been growing its presence in the U.S., having acquired catalytic converter recycler Daniel Ball Recycling in Johnson City, Tennessee, last year. Earlier in the decade, Elemental acquired catalytic converter recycling companies Maryland Core in Baltimore and Legend Smelting and Recycling in Hebron, Ohio, as well as a controlling stake in PGM of Texas.

Elemental expanded into the information technology asset disposition and electronics recycling sector in the U.S. in 2023 with the purchase of New Hampshire-based Colt Recycling LLC and Colt Recycling Southeast LLC in Hickory, North Carolina. Colt Recycling has facilities in Hudson and Hickory, New Hampshire, that processed a combined total of 80 million pounds of electronic scrap per year at the time of the purchase, recovering precious metals and performing asset disposition services and reselling reusable equipment. (Colt Refining of Merrimack, New Hampshire, is a separate entity and was not included in the acquisition.)

Jarski says, “These two operations are a continuation of Elemental Group’s strategic investments and geographic expansion in the United States and North America. Thanks to our waste collection network covering a large part of the USA, we plan to become a leader in obtaining metals from three types of waste—used car catalytic converters, e-waste and, shortly, lithium-ion batteries.”

Urban mining’s importance

Jarski points to the growing trend in urban mining globally, saying, “People and businesses alike realize that recovering metals from end-of-lifetime products and postproduction scrap is much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than primary mining.”

While he says the recycling landscape in Poland and the rest of Europe share a common framework of environmental regulations, the U.S. is different as it’s driven primarily by profitability and more focused on recycling information technology than waste electrical and electronic equipment more broadly. Jarski points to e-scrap recycling levels in Europe that range from 45 percent to 50 percent compared with 15 percent to 20 percent in the U.S. “Nevertheless, both European and U.S. markets are very competitive.”

He describes the prospects for the future of urban mining as “extremely promising."

“The development of this industry will result from the growing demand for critical raw materials found in used car catalytic converters, lithium-ion batteries and electronic waste," he says. "The ecological awareness of society, which is growing year by year, is also important. This can be seen in the example of the automotive industry and the increase in the production of electric cars. Faced with the limitations of traditional mining, obtaining lithium, rhodium or platinum through recycling is becoming a key element of metal supply chains, supporting the development of electric vehicles.”

Jarski adds that Europe’s focus on the circular economy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions make urban mining’s prospects particularly promising. “European Union initiatives supporting recycling and recovery of raw materials from waste support the development of this industry," he says.

“In the [U.S.], actions are also taken to increase the efficiency of the use of raw materials and reduce the amount of waste, which may contribute to the increasing importance of urban mining in this region. It will be crucial to continue promoting innovation, supporting research into effective recycling technologies and creating an appropriate regulatory framework.”