Gold in them thar phones: NZ’s Mint opens its first e-waste mining plant … in Sydney

There are three remarkable things about the “biorefinery” that Kiwi firm Mint Innovation is opening in Sydney today.

1. Finding treasure in trash

One, it will use unique “bioremedial” process to extract rare and precious
metals from old cellphones, laptops and other e-waste.

Co-founder and chief executive Will Barker says the Sydney plant is configured to process around 3000 tonnes of e-waster per year, producing around half a tone of gold and 600 tonnes of copper from that material.

Barker says his company will sell the metals it mines directly to electronics makers (think the likes of Apple and Samsung) in a bid to create a “circular ecosystem”).

Although gold is the headline grabber, his firm will also extract a slew of other metals, from copper to palladium – which, and its usual traditional mining source cut off by the Ukraine war, is suddenly in hot demand for catalytic converters.

“We devoted ourselves to the challenge of extracting materials from circuit boards, which contain 40-plus metals, many of which are hazardous and the most valuable of which is gold – but it’s actually amongst the lowest concentration metal [on a circuit board] so it’s very, very difficult to recover it,” Barker explains.

“So we’ve developed our own biological technology that enables us to selectively recover gold from circuit boards. And once you’ve recovered the gold, you’re then able to target the other metals using conventional, reasonably well-known chemistry.”

Mint isn’t in the business of collecting e-waste. Instead, it works with local partners. Barker says it will gives them an alternative to what’s been the usual avenue: shipping e-waste offshore.

And the Kiwi firm has partnered with Australian’s Scipher Technologies (billed as “a leading Australian urban mining recycler”) on its maiden plant in Sydney. Barker says in other territories, Mint might also choose a local partner – but it also has the wherewithal to go it alone.

2: Recycling money

Two, Mint is a classic example of entrepreneurs from an NZ successful company – in this case, bio-fuel firm LanzaTech, now based in the US – feeding back into the local ecosystem with money and skills. Barker is a former LanzaTech vice-president.

And the young firm’s backers are a lineup of those who’ve benefitted from previous exits including Sir Stephen Tindall, Sam Morgan, Auckland-based Icehouse Ventures (the largest single investor with a 28 per cent stake and Wellington-based Movac (27 per cent). Australasian VC outfit Blackbird (4 per cent) is also in the mix.

Collectively, the backers have chipped in $26 million since 2016 across Series A and B rounds. Mint is now gearing up for a Series C round on the back of the commercial proof-of-concept Sydney plant that Barker says will be in the region of $40m to $60m.

3. Leaving home before they’ve seen the country

Three – and this not so much “good” remarkable, at least for NZ – Barker says Mint choose Sydney for its first commercial plant in part because it received a $4 million federal government grant. “That was a decent-sized chunk of the capital necessary to build a plant,” the CEO says.

Movac partner David Beard says while Mint has received a degree of government backing in its home country (the startup has been a Callaghan Innovation grant recipient), the Australian government’s direct backing of the new plant helped move the needle.

More broadly, Beard says although New Zealand talks a green e-waste game, Australia actually takes a tougher line on e-waste.

“With all these sorts of things, you’ve got to put the plants where you have the least amount of friction and the highest possible return. You need both financial and regulatory support,” Beard says.

“In Australia, it’s illegal to dump e-waste into a landfill and there’s a really strong recycling community.” (Here, the Government and many councils encourage e-recycling, but it has been estimated that 98 per cent of our e-waste goes into landfill – which, apart from wasting valuable materials, is problematic for the environment).

“We’d love to have a New Zealand plant but this could be a bit of a wake-up call for NZ,” Beard says.

Barker says the planning is now well advanced for the second plant, which will be in the UK.

Beard says after that Mint is likely to target various countries within the European Union, given the EU’s well-developed programmes to support e-waste recycling, which are tied to its strict environmental guidelines.

The Movac partner says his firm was attracted to invest in Mint primarily because Barker had proved his chops at LanzaTech, but he says the firm has been a model startup since – proving its technology in the lab for its $6m Series A round, building a pilot plant for its Series B round, and now opening its first commercial plant as the springboard for its Series C round.

Beard says Movac is doing due diligence and likely to support the Series C round. But he also sees it likely that some big international venture capital players will come on board for the current raise, or a Series D round already on the drawing board.

He shares with the Herald financial costs and projected and profit for the Sydney plant – which are commercially confidential but, if they pan out, would be compelling. Revenue is expected to be up to $40m per year.

Beard sees Mint extraction plants in hundreds of cities. “It would be naive to think there are no competitors,” to the startup’s bioremedial process, “But they are years behind. They’re still in R&D,” he says.

A tough time to raise money?

Investors so far seem very happy and are shaping up to support the Series C raise.

“The commissioning of Mint’s first full-scale plants is one of the most significant commercial milestones in the New Zealand tech scene since Pete [Peter Beck] launched his first rocket. It is the culmination of seven years of hard work by Will and the team and the development of world-leading technology,” says Icehouse CEO Robbie Paul.

He adds: “Investing in Will from day one was an easy choice for us. He was applying his learnings from six years at Lanzatech and using a similar technology to address a massive waste stream.”

But there’s also no doubting that in recent times the tide has turned in venture capital, with rising interest rates, falling sharemarkets and recession fears dampening activity.

“It’s definitely not a great time to raise money, but with particular industry everybody’s recognising the climate emergency – so the sector is a strong ESG [environmental and social governance] story; a low-carbon story. So tend to be insulated a little bit – but still, there have been better times for us to raise money.”

Beard says many VCs are now running the ruler a lot harder over startups’ books, and that if they do decide to invest, it can be at a lower valuation.

But he says good firms can still raise money at the sort of multiples we saw during the recent boom.

“We’re really keen to support the Series C,” he says, “But we’re also keen for new investors to come onboard.”