Still in its early stages, but planned to run for two years, the project is designed to develop the use of waste products from the seafood industry to recover metals from the effluent generated in PCB and related manufacturing processes. The UK’s seafood industry generates large volumes of shellfish waste, including the shells of crabs and other crustaceans. These shells are typically expensive to dispose of but are also a source of materials known as chitosans which are known to have the capacity to absorb metals.
A key initial aspect of the project will be to change the crab shells into useable materials and this will involve their mechanical and chemical conversion into a granular form with optimized absorption capabilities. The materials will then be evaluated over a range of operating conditions to determine how well they can absorb copper. Once saturated with copper, it will be desorbed into a solution from which it can be recovered as a metal by electroplating.
The overall aim is to use the materials produced from the crab shells in a similar manner to ion exchange resins, so that once the metal has been desorbed, the chitosan materials can be reused. Again, the influence of absorption, desorption and plating conditions will be studied in order to optimize the overall process efficiency. Ultimately, the project partners are aiming to develop regenerable chitosan-based materials and to define accompanying processes for a range of metals.
The project consortium represents the whole requisite supply chain, from a supplier of crab shells to an end user PCB fabricator. Specifically, the partners are Kynance Cornish Crab, Chestech, Env-Aqua Solutions, C-Tech Innovation, Invotec, the Surface Engineering Association and the Institute of Circuit Technology.
