Jean Zeid 06:52, March 19, 2024

Every morning, Jean Zeid delivers the best in terms of innovation.

This Tuesday, he returns to the strange idea of ​​Austrian scientists from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna led by Dr. Klemens Kremser.

They believe that brewer's yeast can help recycle metal waste.

This Tuesday morning, we're talking about beer and electronic waste. 


Can beer, and more specifically brewer's yeast, help recycle metal waste?

It's the strange idea of ​​Austrian scientists from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna led by Dr. Klemens Kremser.


To improve the recovery of precious metals, they turned to the key component of beer often called “concentrated yeast extract” – and which is actually used in the beer-making process.  


What does this have to do with metal recycling?


Because this yeast could prove promising for metal recovery.

In any case, this is what the results published by this university working group and by K1-MET GmbH, a metallurgical competence center, suggest.

These results demonstrate that the addition of dried yeast waste makes it possible to recover more than half of the aluminum, 40% of the copper and 70% of the zinc contained in the test waste.


You should know that electronic waste is most often made up of several different materials and very difficult to separate in order to recover them in isolation.

This is where brewer's yeast comes in.


Are there other processes capable of recovering these metals?


Yes, certain bacteria, algae, clay and biological charcoal as well, these are options which under study, they work, but they most often target a single metal, not several.


What brewer's yeast does is recover metals from water through a process called adsorption or biosorption.

Except it doesn't do it in its natural state.

This yeast must be at a given PH and temperature.

Once done, it works like a switch and the yeast binds to specific metals depending on the PH and temperature.


An inexpensive solution ultimately.


Inexpensive and environmentally friendly.

Since yeast itself is recyclable, it can be reused five times without worry to selectively recover metals.

How far are we from an industrialized solution for separating metals to separate zinc, aluminum, copper and nickel from a computer for example? Laboratory tests remain tests, not large-scale exploitation, but also astonishing as it may seem, brewer's yeast may be the future of electronic waste recycling.