RETURN

Turning Europe’s E-Waste into a Strategic Resource.

We are building a cyber-physical infrastructure to secure Europe’s critical raw materials – in a clean, efficient, and sustainable way.

The digital age is built on precious metals, yet our methods for recovering them remain stuck in the industrial past. The RETURN project exists to break this deadlock. By fusing advanced artificial intelligence, green chemistry, and blockchain transparency, we are creating a new paradigm for the circular economy: one where electronic waste is not a burden, but Europe’s most valuable mine.

The RETURN project is a consortium of nine partners funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme (Grant No. 101181128) and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

About the Workplan

Our Mission

We are entering a new era of resource scarcity. The Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) required to power our digital and green transitions – Gold, Copper, Palladium, and Silver – are becoming harder to mine and costlier to import. Yet, millions of tonnes of these valuable metals are discarded annually in electronic waste, lost to incineration or exported abroad.

RETURN is not just a research project; it is an industrial intervention. Our mission is to build the first fully circular, economically viable ecosystem for recovering critical metals from electronic waste. By combining Green Chemistry (Deep Eutectic Solvents), Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain technology, we are replacing the energy-intensive smelting of the past with the precision urban mining of the future.

We don’t just recycle. We RETURN value to the economy, independence to Europe, and purity to the planet.

The Challenges of E-Waste Recovery

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The Smelting Dead End

Traditional metal recovery relies on pyrometallurgy – industrial smelting. These massive plants require temperatures over 1,200°C, consume vast amounts of fossil fuels, and release hazardous fumes requiring expensive gas cleaning. Worse, they are designed for volume, not precision, meaning many critical materials are lost in the slag or burned away. The environmental cost of recovering gold this way is staggering: ~38 tonnes of CO2 for every kg of gold produced.

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The Critical Resource Gap

Europe is dangerously dependent on imported Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) like copper, palladium, and rare earths to power its green transition (EVs, wind turbines, solar panels). Yet, we throw these exact materials away. Millions of tonnes of e-waste are exported annually because Europe lacks the clean, mid-scale infrastructure to process them domestically. We are effectively shipping our strategic reserves overseas.

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The Trust Deficit

The recycling supply chain is notoriously opaque. Once e-waste leaves a consumer’s hand, it enters a “black box.” Manufacturers have no way to verify if the “recycled” material they buy is genuinely sustainable or if it was processed using child labor or toxic methods. Without data transparency, true circularity is impossible, as brands cannot make verifiable claims about their products’ footprint.

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The Value Destruction

Current recycling is blunt. It treats a supercomputer the same as a toaster – shredding it into dust to recover raw metals. This “destroy-to-recycle” approach obliterates high-value, functional components like CPUs and memory chips that could have a profitable second life. We are destroying billions of euros in functional technology just to recover pennies in raw material.