Advanced Urban Mining: A Summary of the State of the Art of Metal Recovery out of Dry Bottom Ash

In municipal waste, recyclable resources are very depleted and/or integrated in complex composite materials. The most efficient and reliable way to get rid of any organic material is undoubtedly by incineration, a process which is technically well approved. The basic concept of facilitating and boosting the efficiency of recycling is called thermo recycling and will be presented in this paper. As a promising option to increase the yields of thermo recycling processing, the concept of metal recovery following dry bottom ash extraction will be visualized by the example of the new plant of ZAV Recycling AG in Hinwil, Switzerland. Metal recovery from dry bottom ash is a big step towards minimizing metal dissipation into landfills while creating high quality secondary raw materials. Moreover, this technology may open new opportunities to avoid landfilling of the mineralic residues in future.