Precious metals recovery firm files to go public

A company with a pilot plant for extracting precious metals from printed circuit boards has filed to become a publicly traded company. 

British Columbia-based Modern Mining Technology Corporation, which has a pilot plant in North Carolina, filed a statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as it looks to scale up its hydrometallurgical recycling process. 

The company uses a pre-concentration plant to remove plastics from the printed circuit board (PCB) scrap to produce a metallic sand concentrate (MSC). The MSC is then sent to an aqueous purification plant, which produces separated gold, silver, copper, platinum and palladium.

“Modern Mining’s process, being aqueous-based, is largely carbon neutral, safer for both workers and for the environment, and allows for the recovery of a broader range of metals as separation and recovery is driven by physical methods and simple reagent addition, not complex pyrometallurgy,” according to the company’s prospectus.

Modern Mining was formerly known as Evotus but changed its name to Urban Mining International in October 2020. In December 2021, the name changed again to Modern Mining Technology Corp. 

E-Scrap News wrote about Evotus and its technology in March 2019. Derek Ramsell, the founder and CEO of Evotus, recently told E-Scrap News he sold all of his 68% ownership stake in Evotus to the minority owners of the company in 2020. Ramsell is now CEO of Battery Metals Refining, LLC, a startup focused on extracting metals from lithium-ion batteries.