CRT Lead Recovery

Our crt lead recovery process

Smart Creative Technologies patented process can also be used for the recovery of lead from CRT Leaded Glass screens, the process is able to recover 99.9% of lead from CRT glass. A valuable, clean by-product sodium silicate (liquid glass) is also produced, which has many industrial uses, instead of toxic slag. Globally there are approximately 1.9 billion CRTs still in use, which equates to around 38 million tonnes of leaded glass. European legislation classifies television and computer screens as Hazardous Waste and they cannot be disposed of in ordinary landfills under the Landfill Directive (UK). There are currently two commercial solutions for CRT waste that are utilised in the WEEE recovery marketplace. The first is to export the leaded glass to make new screens.

Long term issues with this method:

The introduction of flat-screen technology has created a declining market for CRTs, therefore the quantity of leaded screens are higher than demand.

Total lead recovery is not possible, at best 50% of lead content recovered.

Lack of environmental compliance for exported material often processed using unregulated methods.

There is a large transportation cost to deliver the waste to remaining CRT manufacturing plants.

The other solution for CRT waste in metal smelting. This typically recovers only 50% of the lead, whilst producing a contaminated toxic slag that is either used as landfill or low-value aggregate.

Recovered material values not coming back to companies in the UK.

The Smart Creative Technologies solution demonstrates significant advantages over these processes as we are able to recover more than 99.9% of the lead from the glass and produce a valuable, clean by-product –sodium silicate (water glass or liquid glass) – that has many industrial uses, instead of toxic slag. Our process has a much less environmental impact and is more cost, time and energy efficient than smelting (for lead extraction) and high-temperature furnace manufacturing (for sodium silicate).

Smart Creative Technologies have utilised a solution that allows us to use the Sodium Silicate (liquid glass) generated from our CRT Lead recovery process as an ingredient to produce a 98% recycled block formula, Our Unique formula reduces the need for cement in the concrete manufacturing process, The unique solution means that our process is not only unique, but its also Carbon positive. Our unique Geo Polymer is created from redundant Lead CRT waste that would have previously languished untreated or consigned to deep burial landfills.