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Innovation... Making it work! Teck Cominco |
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Teck Cominco: New business in waste metals
How do you grow and diversify when your business is making the same base metals you have been making for a hundred years? One way is to extract every scrap of value from the raw material - to use even the squeal of the pig. If it isn't used it becomes a waste.
Teck Cominco has become very good at preventing waste by finding ways of using everything. Susan Knoerr*, manager of technical and business development, oversees this growing aspect of the company's future at Trail. *Please note: Susan Knoerr is now at Teck Cominco, Vancouver.
The bulk concentrates used to make zinc and lead contain many other elements. Some are present in tiny amounts yet have high value in the huge electronics industry. Germanium for example is just one element that used to be wasted and now contributes significantly to Trail's bottom line.
But what happens to those metals when we chuck away those electronic gadgets that seem to become obsolete every year. Presently they end up in landfills. There's got to be a better way, right? Why not recover those metals so they can be used over again.
That is just what Teck Cominco will be doing beginning in January. Tonnes of scrap computers, televisions, etc. - 'urban ore' as David Goosen, business development superintendent, calls it - will be shredded at KC Recycling in Trail and processed in the smelter. "It gives us some revenue from treatment fees regardless of cyclical metal prices; it's environmentally permitted; it supports jobs; everything is either totally consumed or recycled into other products, even the slag goes into cement," he said. "And it's the right thing to do."
Teck Cominco contact information
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