Recycling Tantalum and Process Materials: Use Less by Recycling More

In today’s world, recycling is a strategic and business-critical activity, and commonly referenced in environmental, social and governance (ESG) circles. Recycling in manufacturing context generally means to recover waste with the intent to reuse or reintroduce into the value stream or provide to another business for use. The tantalum industry commonly quotes that 25% to 30% of the annual tantalum consumption is recovered for recycling. GAM’s annual recycle consumption falls in this industry range when combining external and internally generated tantalum scrap consumption. For GAM’s processes, recycling is generally focused on recovering tantalum atoms to reintroduce into GAM’s internal tantalum production process, but there are some broader recycling applications found within GAM’s tantalum processing. The following presentation of GAM’s recycling activities does not include post-consumer recycling (i.e. paper or aluminum can), recycling activities of the broader tantalum industry (i.e. – spent tantalum sputtering targets) nor the recovery and use of tantalum ore as a co-product of lithium mining. The latter will be covered under a separate and dedicated presentation.

For safety, health, environmental, and business reasons, GAM makes every effort to recover and recycle tantalum atoms that manage to escape the manufacturing process. Highlights of those efforts for the processing at the Boyertown PA and Aizu Japan site follow:

• Process step to capture undigested tantalum

• Process step intentionally designed to capture uncrystalized tantalum

• Dust collectors throughout the manufacturing process that capture fine tantalum particles which are in turn re-introduced to the manufacturing process

• Tantalum is captured in floor sweeping, trenches, sump pits, settling tanks, etc. and re-introduced to the manufacturing process

• Tantalum that escapes the value stream when attached to spent reagents is post filtered and re-introduced to the manufacturing process

• Once the end of life cycle is reached, in-process equipment that is made out of tantalum is reused and recycled

• Condensate from the walls of melting furnaces that contains tantalum is collected and re-introduced

• Turnings or skins from a tantalum ingot are recovered and recycled

• Solid tantalum and niobium pieces like edge trim, forging drops, milling losses, etc. are captured and recycled

• Press cake is processed to recover tantalum contained in this process stream

In addition to the focused recovery and recycling activities associated with the tantalum and niobium metal processing at Boyertown and Aizu the manufacturing sites also recover and recycle process consumables and machine fluids like:

• Extraction fluids are recovered and reused internally

• Capacitor powder processing fluids are recovered, externally reprocessed and reused external to GAM

• Reduction reagents are post processed and reused internally

• Reducing metals are recovered and externally processed into reusable metal

• Rolling fluids and machine oils are recovered and recycled

In summary, GAM realizes the safety, health, environmental and business importance of recycling stewardship: Use Less by Recycling More. To this extent, GAM works daily to responsibly and extensively recover and recycle tantalum and niobium.