The European Union faces several challenges caused by globalization. Both the delocalization of production plants (leading to more imported products) and the instability characterizing several industrial sectors force economies to re-think their business models and re-adapt them in a new context, where the sustainability of products and processes is more relevant. Within this overall framework, the need to think about innovative business models and industrial strategies, able to answer to these new requirements is mandatory. One chance is the exploitation of digital technologies. Another is the exploitation of secondary (and critical) resources that, currently, are wasted without any recovery. The project FENIX wants to consider both these issues and their potential at the same time, proposing something that could allow Europe to re-appropriate its pertaining position in the global market. The idea is to study innovative business models and industrial strategies (based on the circular economy paradigm) enabling the development of new product-services through the definition of novel supply chains, resulting from an unconventional mix of current ones. This could allow the easy re-use, reconfiguration and modularization of production systems, the exploitation of overcapacity and the renaissance of industrial poles all over the Europe. Furthermore, the circular economy driven business models and industrial strategies proposed by project FENIX will be demonstrated in existing pilot plants, adequately reconfigured and integrated based circular economy needs.

PEACOC will showcase a first-of-a-kind economically and environmentally viable pre-commercial metallurgical system for recovering Precious Metals (PMs) (i.e. Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) identified as critical raw materials by the European Commission (EC), as well as gold (Au) and silver (Ag)), highly important for the EU economy, from a wide variety of abundant end-of-life (EPEACOC will showcase a first-of-a-kind economically and environmentally viable pre-commercial metallurgical system for recovering Precious Metals (PMs) (i.e. Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) identified as critical raw materials by the European Commission (EC), as well as gold (Au) and silver (Ag)), highly important for the EU economy, from a wide variety of abundant end-of-life (EoL) products in Europe. The concept is mainly based on previously developed recovery and refining technologies to TRL 5 in the PLATIRUS Research and Innovation project (Micro-Wave assisted leaching and Gas Diffusion Electrocrystallization GDEx), which were flagged by the Innovation Radar initiative of the EC as excellent innovations and showed a significant cost reduction and lower environmental impact compared to state-of-the-art hydrometallurgical processes as will be shown throughout the proposal. The PEACOC system will be demonstrated at pre-commercial scale at TRL7 with capacity to treat ~50t of PMs concentrates/year i.e., with a recovery capacity of i)2 kg PGMs/week from spent autocatalysts (containing ~2.5kg PGMs/t), ii) 0.5-1 kg Au/week from Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) with a focus on low and medium grade PCBA (containing 20-100 g Au/t) that are currently poorly valorized in industrial smelting processes due to low PM concentrations, and iii) 10 kg Ag/week from EoL Photovoltaic (PV) panels (containing ~3-10 kg Ag/t) which will be an abundant resource in Europe in the coming few years. The project will demonstrate the production of PMs at a profit margin up to 80% with respect to current PMs market prices.