Process description rotary kiln
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REMONDIS QR’s plants in Dorsten and Lübeck focus on professionally treating and recycling or disposing of mercury in accordance with all rules and regulations – work that the majority of waste management businesses are unable to take on. Decades of experience, state-of-the-art technology and the international REMONDIS Group in the background guarantee the safe treatment of the world’s most hazardous heavy metal: mercury!
Large quantities of waste containing mercury – such as catalysts, activated carbon, soil and sludge – are treated in our rotary kiln to recover the mercury (via distillation). By heating up the materials in the kiln, the mercury is transformed into gas and can be removed from the waste. This is a continuous process. The remaining waste is sent on for normal treatment once the mercury has been removed; the recovered mercury is transformed into mercury sulfide and then taken away for disposal.
Process description rotary kiln
Mercury is stabilised in our vacuum mixer. An exothermic reaction transforms the mercury – both the mercury recovered from our rotary kiln and metallic mercury from a variety of industries (chlor-alkali industry, mines etc) – into non-toxic mercury sulfide. This is then sent to German salt mines for long-term storage.
Process description mercury stabilisation
Our plant in Lübeck operates a distillation plant that is run under vacuum. Batches of waste contaminated with mercury are treated in this unit at pressure levels below 50 millibar so that the mercury can be recovered and removed. Pieces of equipment and waste fractions containing large-sized particles can also be treated here. What’s more, this plant can process waste that contains precious metals as well as mercury – a type of waste that is often only generated in small quantities.
We clean the mercury that we have recovered in our special distillation plant in Lübeck (under vacuum) so that we can sell it on to our customers whenever it is needed.
Our plants in Dorsten and Lübeck operate semi-automated facilities to sort household batteries according to their electrochemical systems (e.g. NiCd, NiMh, Pb).
Our button cell battery sorting plant separates the batteries into electrochemical systems (e.g. Hg, Li) so that the batches containing mercury can be sent on for thermal treatment. All of the sorted button cell batteries are recycled.