HP is mining its own e-waste to build its latest laptops |
HP is mining its own e-waste to build its latest laptops
Recycling startup Mint Innovation partnered with the tech giant to make the industry’s first batch of closed-loop recycled copper from old HP computers and printers.
Inside a new HP laptop, the copper in its heat sink comes straight from old HP devices—making the company the first to reuse its own recycled metal in a closed loop.
In partnership with HP, the Australia-based startup Mint Innovation took in circuit boards from thousands of old HP computers and servers, and then recycled them to supply pure refined copper back to the company. The process is designed to be more sustainable than traditional smelting. Instead of melting down metals in a furnace—an energy-intensive, polluting process—the startup uses a mix of chemicals and biology to recover valuable materials.
“What HP is effectively doing is mining e-waste of their own appliances,” says Mint president Matt Bedingfield. “They’re taking responsibility for their full supply chain to turn it into the next generation of devices.”
Old circuit boards are shredded and run through a series of tanks containing custom biological materials that pull out metals like gold and copper. The “biosorption” process works like a magnet, using electrons to attract specific elements. When gold is dissolved, for example, and electrons are stripped from its surface, it’s drawn to biological matter with extra electrons.
Gold “is the economic enabler” for the process, Bedingfield says: “If you don’t recover the gold, you don’t make any profit. So after the gold, then we go and we recover the copper, then the silver, the tin, and the palladium.”
Copper is particularly important at the moment. “In the U.S. right now, we’re about a million tons short on copper,” he says. “Copper is required for every single bit of the energy transition. It’s required for the data centers that we’re building. So that gap is only going to grow. The HPs and Apples and other OEMs in other industries, they’re all looking for copper to begin with. And then they’re looking for sustainable copper.”
For HP, it’s part of a bigger push to help build new circular supply chains for the electronics industry. The quality of the recycled material is identical to new copper, the company says.
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