Erion is an Italian Producer Responsibility Organisation (PRO) dedicated to management of various types of waste, including electronic waste, batteries, packaging, textiles, and tobacco waste.
With the goal to drive environmental responsibility, regulatory compliance, circular economy and innovation in Italy, Erion complements its operations with the participation in various European funded research projects.
The company is the coordinator of New-RE, a project supported by EIT Raw Materials that aims to reduce reliance on imported Rare Earth Elements (REEs) by improving the recycling of permanent magnets from electronic waste and electric vehicles. The End-of-life value chain of these products is tackled and enhanced in New-RE through the development of an innovative hydrometallurgical process which recovers secondary materials and the realization of an automated disassembly system for the extraction of magnets from Hard Drive Disks. The value chain is covered by project partners that go from pre-treatment facilities, GlobEco and Treee, disassembly, OSAI, industrial developers, Smart Waste Engineering and Itelyum, and academia, University of l’Aquila and the KU Leuven.
On 18th September, an important milestone of the project has been reached with the inauguration of the recycling pilot plant at the Itelyum Regeneration facility in Ceccano (Frosinone, Italy). During the day, speakers emphasized the strategic importance of this facility at European level, followed by demonstration and explanatory activities in which visitors were able to follow closely the various steps involved in recycling these products. The pilot plant will be able to treat more than 20 tons of permanent magnets per year thanks to the patented hydrometallurgical process, which involves green leaching of Rare Earths through organic acid solutions that can be reused up to five times.
The technologies applied in the New-RE plant will be used for industrial scale-up as part of INSPIREE, a European project funded by CINEA within the LIFE program. When fully operational, the industrial plant will be able to treat up to 2,000 tons of permanent magnets per year. Considering that the annual European production of permanent magnets is 1,600 tons, Italy would already be able to develop a circular value chain for recycling them within European borders, thus reducing dependence on non-EU imports, especially from Russia and China.
The WEEE Forum a.i.s.b.l. is an international association representing 51 producer responsibility organisations across the globe. Together with our members, we are at the forefront of turning the extended producer responsibility principle into an effective electronic waste management policy approach through our combined knowledge of the technical, business and operational aspects of collection, logistics, de-pollution, processing, preparing for reuse and reporting of e-waste. Our mission is to be the world’s foremost e-waste competence centre excelling in the implementation of the circularity principle.
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