A new take on a widely used mining technique called froth flotation can recover “virtually all” of the metallic silver contained within an end-of-life solar panel, researchers from the University of Newcastle say.
The newly-refined method builds on work done at the Centre for Critical Minerals and Urban Mining (CRITIUM) last year, which got a 97 per cent recovery rate from a single batch.
This time, by continuously feeding a wet slurry of ground up solar panels into a tank over 90 minutes, they were able to lift this recovery rate by almost two percent.
Averaged across the whole 90 minutes, they recovered 98.74 per cent of the silver. But during just over a quarter of the time the system hit a 100 per cent recovery rate.
“Our earlier small-scale batch research proved flotation could recover silver from solar panels,” said co-author and CRITIUM deputy director Mahshid Firouzi in a statement.
