Study: Researchers Successfully Recover Metals from E-Waste Using Spent Brewer’s Yeast

Electronic waste has become a steady issue as the industry churns out new products faster than we can get through a full life cycle with our gadgets. Attempting to keep up, the waste industry is always looking for new ways to deal with e-waste materials and, according to a new report, beer of all things may be a new solution for e-waste recycling.

A new study published by Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology covers the methodology and success of using spent brewer’s yeast to collect and recover valuable metals from electronic waste. This happens by putting the yeast through several stages, separating it from being just a result of beer creation and manipulating several factors including pH levels.

After a series of processes, the yeast was lyophilized, or freeze-dried, by scientists and used in biosorption experiments. Combining the waste yeast biomass with synthetic polymetallic solutions, the experiment found that it could remove 50% of aluminum at a pH level of 3.5, over 40% of copper at pH 5.0, and over 70% of zinc at pH 7.5.

In addition, when the yeast solution was applied to a real polymetallic waste stream produced from the leaching of printed circuit boards, the process could recover more than 50% of copper at pH 3.5 and over 90% of zinc at pH 7.5. The yeast was used in five consecutive biosorption steps and was proved to have reusability as there were little differences in its recovery ability.

The experiment concludes that spent brewer’s yeast can successfully be used to recover metals from polymetallic waste streams sustainably selectively.

While the study proved to be a success, researchers ended the study by mentioning that further testing would be needed as they believe biosorption can still be improved to reach higher recovery rates. Researchers stress that focusing on different waste streams in new studies needs to test them for the potential of interfering metal ions and mixed metal solutions.

For now, the study shows that there can be successful metal recovery from spent brewer’s yeast, of all things. It’s a big move in the world of e-waste recycling and sustainability as yeast is often available industry-wide, cheap to obtain, and could soon be working to recover metals from our waste stream.