Recycling
Along with being a major mining and exploration company, we are one of the world’s leading recyclers of electronic scrap. These materials contain precious metals, such as gold, silver, platinum, palladium and copper. Recycling has the twofold benefit of extending the life of these metals and reducing landfill volumes.
Xstrata Recycling processes metallic copper scrap and more than 110,000 tonnes of metal-bearing materials such as printed circuit boards, integrated circuits and mobile phones every year. We sample materials at facilities in Rhode Island and California to analyse their content, then process them at our Horne smelter and CCR refinery in Canada.
Xstrata Copper’s recycling business works with plants principally located in Canada, the US and Europe, which process the end-of-life electronics and send the resulting material for recycling. These types of processing plants normally produce steel, aluminum, plastic, copper and precious metals that are sold to the most appropriate outlets. Little, if anything, is sent to landfill.
At our smelter dust treatment plant at Altonorte, Chile, we recycle the stockpiled metallurgical dust generated during copper processing. Approximately 90% of the copper contained in the dust is recovered and can be fed back into the smelter.
