Starting in May 2021 and technically ending in February 2022, our recycling project in REMIND took almost ten months. We have been snowballing due to the support from S4S. We have officially launched our website (https://remind.co.id/), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/remind-id/), and Instagram account (@id.remind) within the collaboration period.
Let's have a flashback; We started the project by collecting e-waste from the societies through our social media campaign. At the same time, we bought new separation equipment to improve our recycling process and set up our recycling pilot before starting the recycling experiments. We have collected 17.7 kg of e-waste from people who are very aware of the danger that might be caused by improper treatment of e-waste. We have converted this e-waste into approximately 8 grams of recycled gold with more than 90% purity. Around 2.5 grams of gold were sent for analysis, while the remaining 5.5 grams were kept. We were glad that we had sold this 5.5 grams of recycled gold to the local jewelry store for IDR 2,720,000 (EUR 172). This transaction was extraordinary because this was the first time we could sell our recycled gold. This recycled gold is essential for our future because its embodied energy is much lower than the conventional gold produced from primary production (mining/extraction).
Apart from the recycling experiment, we have successfully collaborated with external parties. First, we concluded a collaboration with Bumi Buddies (NGO) to educate the societies about e-waste with a target audience of young people aged 6-18 years old through Instagram. We shared the general information on e-waste, including the reels on how to take responsible action on our e-waste that we can find at home. We agreed on a second collaboration with the National Research and Innovation Agency (Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional, BRIN), a cabinet-level government agency formed by the Indonesian government in 2019 as Indonesia's Sole National Research Agency. The collaboration is a joint research project with the topic of "Precious Metal Extraction through Hydrometallurgy based on Urban Mining." This collaboration is the next step of our recycling project with S4S. Remind will lead the project backed with technical and financial support from BRIN and will be carried out throughout 2022. We just had a kick-off meeting with BRIN a few weeks ago. The output of this collaboration is to produce an international published paper and intellectual property from the recycling of e-waste.
Last but not least, as sustainability means to have a long-lasting and continuous project, we are sure that we can continue to make good use of the equipment and milestones supported by S4S in our next project with BRIN. We thank you very much to S4S that Remind has grown this far. We aim to achieve our goals toward a circular economy by preventing e-waste from contaminating the environment through proper recycling and recovering the value inside the e-waste. As a closing statement, Let's take a meaningful word made by one of the most prominent recyclers in the Netherlands and our role model, Renewi, which brilliantly has a motto of Waste No More!
Don't forget to follow REMIND's social media to join us on the journey on the recycling of electronic waste in Indonesia!
