Again this year, an extensive conference program awaited the participants, including 28 lectures, a final round table, two workshops and three plant tours to the Montanwerke Brixlegg AG, the Austrian recycling group Müller-Guttenbrunn GmbH and the company Elektronik-Altgeräte-Recycling West GmbH on the agenda.

Dr. Peter Hense, head of the group recycling technologies at Fraunhofer UMSICHT, presented the iCycle® technology in his talk “Enabling the Recycling of High-Tech Metals – Joined Treatment of Halogenated Plastics with Metal Containing Fractions”. Besides a detailed explanation of the process including application examples and business case calculations for the iCycle® technology, Dr. Hense also introduced a new chlorination module to the audience. This module allows a recovery of critical metals like Indium, Germanium or Platinum group metals from composite materials such as liquid crystal displays (LCD), glass fiber cables or car catalysts. For the recovery of these metals, a joined treatment of a number of different chlorine containing waste fractions is conducted, which enables a cost-effective recovery of the critical metals.

The congress program was accompanied by an exhibition, which this year featured 62 companies. At the booth of Fraunhofer UMSICHT, Martin Nieberl and Peter Hense explained details of the iCycle® technology and provided participants with an overview of the innovations currently available at Fraunhofer UMSICHT.

The next IERC 2019 will again take place in Salzburg from January 16 to 18, 2019.