The metals refining startup building is quite a big challenge combined with inspiration, imagination, science, technology, engineering, development and operations. Interesting fact – at early stages all those challenges were solved by agile style. You need to solve all these challenges at the same time. The best technology might not be the most financially sustainable and the financially sustainable technology might not meet all modern and future regulatory requirements. The challenges for the sustainable technologies are related with carbon footprint, labor protection and safety, automation and operations.

The small example – the electronic waste recycling facility in the EU and U.S. to be sustainably operated needs to process 10-30 times more materials by applying the same labor, area, power and water consumption. The sustainability is mostly explained by operational efficiency – 20-50% margin. The capital expenses of course could vary due to the limited amount of the companies that provide equipment and engineering. In many cases the companies need to develop specific manufacturing steps separately which lead to increasing the project cost.  Additional sustainability challenge is the rapidly and constantly changing materials. The value of the comedy changes by changing the most valuable element concentration. The refining project need to understand it clearly to operate effectively today, tomorrow and after tomorrow.