Milan, 19 December. (Adnkronos) – Nord Engineering, a Cuneo company that designs and builds smart urban waste collection systems, has acquired 60% of Arezzo-based BTT Italia, part of the Lem Industries group and Tcb which designs and builds metal recovery and refining plants precious from WEEE. The closing was signed in November, following an industrial partnership that began in 2023 for the design of a container for the collection of waste electrical and electronic equipment. With the acquisition, Nord Engineering and BTT Italia preside over the beginning and end of the value chain of WEEE recovery and treatment: with the Nord Engineering container it is collected, with plants such as “Hydro B One” the precious metals present are refined in WEEE such as gold, platinum, palladium, silver and copper. BTT Italia, in fact, maintains its presence on the market and continues the construction of plants such as the “Hydro B One” in Terranuova Bracciolini, in Tuscany, managed starting from 20 December by Iren.
BTT Italia, in Marciano della Chiana, in the province of Arezzo, has been designing and building processes and systems for the recovery and refining of precious metals since 1979. It has developed important know-how in tailor-made, high-performance, safe and stable solutions for the industry goldsmith, mining and WEEE recovery. BTT Italia introduced the first rotating reactors and, today, holds the technology based on hydrometallurgical processes to recover and refine precious metals with very low CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
Nord Engineering (Caraglio, CN), on the market for 20 years, is among the leading companies in the smart waste management sector. Its products are sold in around twenty countries around the world. Nord Engineering has developed the innovative Easy Collection System, an automatic bilateral single-operator equipment capable of collecting different types of containers.
As the Foundation for Sustainable Development recalls in the report “Recycling in Italy 2024”, the WEEE collection rate stands at 30% for 2023; still decreasing as in previous years and far from the 65% that the European Union has set as a target in 2019. In detail, according to data from the WEEE Collection Centre, in Italy in 2023 the 349,345 tonnes collected were reached, with a change of -3.1% compared to 2022. Furthermore, the Critical Raw Materials Act (EU Regulation 2024/1252) entered into force last May, it added as an objective between now and 2030 the increase in the recycling of critical raw materials, to allow the coverage of at least 25% of their consumption in the European Union. With eight plants with hydrometallurgical technology by 2040 (according to an estimate by The European House – Ambrosetti for Iren), combined with a widespread network of urban containers for WEEE, the quantity of precious metals that would be refined would correspond to the maximum of what is recoverable out of the total of waste collected; with a total value of refined gold estimated at approximately 130 million euros (at current values).
”With this acquisition – says Malachy Musso, CEO of Nord Engineering – the “urban mining” supply chain is at the service of strategic sectors of the Made in Italy industry. The current management of WEEE, in fact, often starts in an ineffective way due to a still little widespread awareness of their correct disposal. Furthermore, a very high share of this waste goes abroad, around 90%. When we announced the industrial partnership between us and BTT Italia at the end of last year, we were clear that it was necessary to make it easier for citizens to dispose of WEEE and recover the precious metals in an environmentally sustainable way. Now we are starting to actively contribute to reducing the foreign dependence of precious and strategic metals for the production of chips, automotive, defense and aerospace”.
For Daniele Gualdani, Lem Industries: ”This operation rewards the last five years of research and development in which BTT Italia has believed and invested resources, approximately 30 percent of its turnover. Technology and innovative processes in the gold sector are our history; now they make us take a leap forward in the circular economy and environmental sustainability of which we are proud and which we put at the service of the country system. At the same time, BTT Italia and Nord Engineering are two companies with strong territorial roots and a great international vocation. The new ownership structure changes nothing in terms of employment and instead opens up a lot in terms of opportunities for both”.
Lucia Leonessi, General Director of Confindustria Cisambiente says she is ”very satisfied with this new acquisition, because it effectively creates a hub of great importance. This is a point of arrival for Nord Engineering and for BTT Italia: I wish them good work and a fruitful path in which the Confindustria Cisambiente Association will always be at their side and that of Italian companies in the Environment sector”.
With the entry of Nord Engineering into the capital of BTT Italia, technological leadership in the sector of the circular economy and know-how of the refining processes of metals, rare earths and strategic materials is given shape. The central theme is to process strategic raw materials in an economically sustainable way and with a reduced environmental impact. The more you recycle what you buy and use, the less you need to extract raw materials. Therefore less impact on soil and water (mining activity) and less pollution in the atmosphere (pyrometallurgical recycling processes). BTT Italia operates with a patented hydrometallurgical technology, which does not use fusion and combustion and therefore has reduced CO2 emissions (about 80 percent less than pyrometallurgical processes).
Both companies operate in international markets and with this operation they combine business management, the international commercial network and foreign offices in Spain, France and South America. This new corporate structure allows us to tackle even more important orders. Every city that equips itself with Nord Engineering bins could, in a year, have a “Hydro B Two” plant (and then a Hydro B Three, and so on) for refining metals from WEEE. The system is modular and covers different sizes of cities or geographical areas. Furthermore, development is also given by “newly founded cities” such as Neom in Saudi Arabia or the new Samarkand in Uzbekistan. Places that immediately integrate urban mining and related logistics into the architectural, engineering and urban planning project, together with aqueducts and sewerage systems.
BTT Italia celebrated its first 45 years of activity this year. Over the previous 40 years, the company has been involved in the construction of plants for the refining of precious metals; in the last five years, the experience gained has been invested in the development of solutions for the recovery of precious and critical metals in the circular economy. During 2024, BTT Italia built the first hi-tech hydrometallurgical plant, the “Hydro B One” in Tuscany, which reduces extraction activity and maximizes the recovery of strategic raw materials from WEEE, without incineration processes.
For the next few years, BTT Italia presents the 12 development guidelines on the topics of the circular economy. These guidelines aim to offer a concrete and feasible industrial vision and perspective for sustainable processes and high-performance plants which, in addition to the recovery of precious metals from WEEE, will extend to the sectors of deep sea mining, the recovery of coal and asbestos, treatment of two strategic elements such as germanium and bismuth. Furthermore, BTT Italia will focus on the treatment of phosphorous powders coming from fluorescent lamps to recover the rare earths present, as well as in NiMH batteries, or the silver from decommissioned photovoltaic panels. Other frontiers are the radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology supply chain, the space industry supply chain and gold hidden in mines, i.e. strategic minerals such as, among others, gallium, cobalt and feldspar .
