EasyMining receives grant to expand its resource recovery

Stockholm, Oct. 27, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) —

The Sahara add-on technology increases the production of ferric chloride and at the same time increases the quality of sand to be used in construction industry.

EasyMining is awarded a grant of more than 3.5 MSEK (million Swedish Krona) from Sweden’s energy agency Energimyndigheten for its Sahara project. Working with several partners, EasyMining will further develop its technology for recovering nutrients from incinerated sewage sludge to extract more resources, like the increasingly scarce ferric chloride.

– The Sahara project was developed as an add-on to our process Ash2Phos, in which we leach sewage sludge ash to recover phosphorus, iron, and aluminium. The amount of iron recovered in this initial process was around 15%, but with Sahara, we can recover more than 98% of the iron and produce a much cleaner ferric chloride, says Hanna Landbring, EasyMining’s Lead Process Engineer and Project Manager for Sahara.

The recovered iron resource is a commodity and a vital component of water treatment in the form of a coagulant which unfortunately is in short supply due to the war in Ukraine and high energy prices.

Furthermore, the Sahara project also improve the quality of the remaining sand that is left after all other resources have been extracted. Without the Sahara add-on the Ash2Phos process generates a red-brown coloured sand. With the Sahara add-on, most of the iron is removed and the sand will be grey and better suited for cement manufacturing.

Hanna Landbring, Lead Process Engineer and Project Manager, and Cristian Tunsu, Manager of Analysis and Quality Control and R&D Lead at EasyMining.

The project was in the initial stages of development, when it was noticed that Energimyndigheten had published a grant focusing on “Circular economy and resource use within the limits of the planet”.

– We realised that we could apply for funding to study this deeper and do more…