London streets 'paved with precious metals like platinum'
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A waste management company has revealed that it is planning to collect tens of thousands of dust from the city’s pavements to turn it into cash.
According to the Sunday Times, Veolia Environment has said that it can extract precious metals such as platinum, palladium and rhodium to recycle them.
“The precious metals are in trace amounts but they are quite valuable,” the Daily Mail quoted Richard Kirkman, Head of technology and waste as saying.
“We have brought together two technologies, conventional soil washing, which removes plastics and metals and glass from street sweepings, and a technique that we use to remove palladium from the fine dust that is left after we have washed the soil,” he stated.
The company will filter palladium from 30,000 tons of road sweepings each year at a processing plant in Rugby, the worth of the metal being around 15 pounds per gram and being used in mobile phones, computers, dental fillings and white gold.
During the filtering process, large stones, glass, plastic and cans will be removed before magnets pick out steel and iron, after which aluminium are recovered, while vibrating conveyor belts partition smaller pieces of plastic, twigs and grit are taken out.
The remaining fine dust will contain an estimated 5kg of palladium, which is worth around 80,000 pounds.
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