Jo Vandenbroucke (51) has been working at Nyrstar for 25 years. As Group Technology & Innovation Manager, he and his team look for new ways to reuse by-products. ‘We want to lose as few natural resources as possible.’
There are six of them, Jo Vandenbroucke and his colleagues. Together they provide technology support to different Nyrstar sites across the world. Each team member has his own specialisation. Jo's is hydrometallurgy: techniques that use aqueous solutions to recover metals.
A practical example? The company InOpSys has been recycling wastewater from Janssen Pharmaceutica for several years, from which it extracts the zinc. ‘That zinc is then recycled and reused on our site,’ says Vandenbroucke.
‘By removing the zinc from the wastewater, this by-product no longer needs to be transported for waste incineration. The removal of metals from wastewater is just one step. Converting it into a reusable form and working with a partner like Nyrstar is crucial to enable recuperation and a circular economy,’ says Steven De Laet, CEO of Inopsys.
‘To date, we have already recovered several tens of tons of zinc. The great thing about zinc is that it’s endlessly recyclable. Most of the world's zinc is used over and over
My job is to spot new circular possibilities and convert residual flows into high-quality products.
Jo Vandenbroucke,
Group Technology & Innovation Manager at Nyrstar
again. Recycled zinc is also an important raw material for Nyrstar,’ says Vandenbroucke.
Copper, silver and gold
As innovation manager, Vandenbroucke is constantly looking for new ways to extract value from the metals processed at Nyrstar. ‘Our raw materials contain almost the entire periodic table (the list of all chemical elements, ed.). We especially need the zinc, which we extract using various techniques. The remaining substances can be raw materials for other applications or for other companies’ production processes.’
Such as the lead that Nystar extracts and is then used by both its own and external lead smelters. The same applies to copper, silver, gold and cadmium.
Economic feasibility
‘One of our most important tasks is to spot new circular possibilities and convert residual flows into high-quality products,’ Vandenbroucke tells us. ‘With a focus on ecology, sustainability, energy efficiency and of course also economic feasibility.’
