Eco-friendly recovery of valuable materials bound in waste streams

Recovery of valuable materials

Our own experience has shown that there is still a great deal of economic potential to be tapped by looking at the liquid or gaseous waste streams of a production process. 

For example: 
it has been possible to convert toxic, sulphurous exhaust gases into valuable sulfuric acid using a biofilter. 

Skillful pre-treatment made it possible to recover most of the bromine as a gas from aqueous waste water containing alkali bromides and feed it back into the chemical process. That’s an outstanding example of the circular economy principle. 

Aqueous waste water containing salts is often concentrated using incinerators and the residue is discharged into the sea. We managed to circumvent this energetically unfavorable, carbon dioxide-intensive combustion process in such a smart way that storage in a mine became highly attractive.

Mixtures of organic solvents are often obtained as residues of organic production procedures. These in general are often incinerated directly on site or somewhere else. However, it makes more sense to separate the solvents by a smart distillation and recycle the pure solvents into the production process again. 

The enumeration of further examples from our own experience could be continued at will. You can be sure that there is also potential for recycling steps in your waste streams of your chemical production process. We would like to support you in identifying potential options. 

That’s a broad area for creativity and an entrepreneurial approach! 

Bildnachweis: BASF SE