Innovative antimony recovery process from lead and plastics wastes.

ended

Every year, only the plastics and lead-acid battery manufacturing European industries need 200 ktons of Antimony for their production processes. But, Europe is dependent on import, being China the largest producer of Antimony (86%). The scarcity of the raw material availability, the monopolistic position of China and dumping policies lead to an extremely high and unstable cost for plastics and battery European industries, with a Antimony market price increased of +600% from 2002 to 2016 and expected to reach 20.000 €/ton after 2020. Stibiox is a innovative process able to recover pure Antimony from the residues of lead metallurgy and from the flame retardants plastics / lead-acid batteries wastes, thanks to a patented process flow composed by a thermal oxidation, a sulphuric acid leaching, a liquid/liquid separation using Tributyl Phosphate as solvent and a final desorption. The process allows disruptive performance in terms of Sb purity (> 99.9%) and cost of recovery (< 6.000 €/tons), thereby allowing to sell the recycled antimony in the raw material market at a cheaper and stable price (< 8.000 €/ton). After the development process started in 2014 and the validation of the solution, TND is ready to develop the first Stibiox prototypal plant, able to recover up to 250 tons/year of Antimony, in order to validate the scaled-up process. The market potentials are huge: only considering the already in progress contacts with potential customers, the Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is 25 ktons/year of pure Sb, for a market value of 200 M€/year. During Phase 1 project, TND will develop a detailed technical and business feasibility analysis, focused on the supply chain optimization for Stibiox process plant fabrication and operation, the prototypal Stibiox process design, the customers validation, the analysis of the achievable markets and the refinement of the Business Model to be implemented in the Market Entry phase.