PEACOC was a pre-commercial pilot for the efficient recovery of precious metals from European end-of-life resources with novel low-cost technologies. First-of-its-kind, low-cost and eco-friendly technologies are used for efficient recovery of gold, silver and platinum group metals (PGMs) from waste.

Precious Metals and PGMs are widely used in a variety of economic sectors in many industrial applications worldwide. Due to their unique properties, such as low corrosiveness, catalytic properties and low electrical resistivity, there are often no alternatives to replace them.

Europe is the world top consumer of PGMs, thus it is becoming highly dependent on imports, which are essential for its economy. For those reasons, the European Commission (EC) has classified PGMs as Critical Raw Materials. This EU-funded project aimed to solve the current challenges that limit the recovery of precious metals at massive scale, while exploiting the vast potential of EU secondary resources.

The PEACOC project aimed to research and demonstrate - on a pre-commercial level - novel, effective, low-cost and environmentally friendly technologies for recovering gold, silver and PGMs from complex waste mixtures. The goal was to treat end-of-life products in Europe, including spent autocatalysts, low/mid-grade printed circuit board assemblies and photovoltaic waste.

The project concept was based on previously-developed recovery and refining technologies in the frame of the PLATIRUS H2020 research and innovation project.

The project has now ended: all publicly available outcomes reported by the PEACOC consortium are available on the project’s Results and News webpages.