A SWINDON business has secured £600,000 in Government funding for its answer to where your old smartphones and computers go.

Tetronics International, based at South Marston Park, is part of a consortium including partners Metech Recycling and Vale Europe which succeeded in a bid for funding, to support a £1m project which will extract precious metals from electronic waste.

With the money coming from Innovate UK, which supports sustainable economic growth, Tetronics will develop a plasma facility, capable of recovering the metals for reselling and new products, at its Swindon base.

The environmental technology firm is responding to rising electronic waste levels and believes if this project proves a success it will unlock a billion-pound waste recovery industry for the UK.

Graeme Rumbol, CEO of Tetronics, said: “The British economy is missing out on a billion pounds simply because we are not recovering the value found in electronic waste in an efficient way.

“The grant from Innovate UK will allow us to develop a demonstration facility, which we hope will lead to British companies being able to install the technology in future.

“Being awarded the £600,000 highlights how Tetronics is at the very forefront of innovations in green technology and resource recovery.”

Once up and running, the facility will recover precious metals found in electronic waste including gold and silver.

It is estimated that in the UK around 5.6m tonnes of electronic products will be bought between now and 2020.

The components of these products are expected to include more than 30 tonnes of gold, more than 600 tonnes of silver and more than three tonnes of platinum group metals – when recovered this would have a total market value of more than £1bn.

At present, British handlers of electronic waste typically ship it abroad to a small number of large refiners, which are designed for the recovery of base metals, such as copper.

As a result, precious metal extraction is a by-product in a much larger process, leading to delays in recovering the metal and reduced precious metal recovery efficiencies.

The new development will enable localised waste processing opportunities in the UK and will allow independence from the large refiners.

It will also see around 98 per cent of precious metals in electronics waste being recovered domestically, which can be sold on for use in new products.

The plant being developed by Tetronics and its partners, which is set to open in mid-2016, will use proven plasma smelting technology as part of an integrated process dedicated to the recovery of precious metals from electronic waste.

The technology is already seen as industry-leading in extracting the precious metals from catalytic converters found in cars and from industrial catalysts used to make petrol and the grant will allow a dedicated plasma furnace for electronic waste processing to be built in the UK.