editorial
Abdelaziz Bentaj, founder.
“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”
Antoine Lavoisier
Xcrusher,
an urgent challenge for the future
We are convinced that economic development and sustainable development are closely linked. We are equally convinced that in today’s world, the circular economy must be a, if not THE, vector for the future growth of our societies. It requires every one of us, companies and individuals, to reconcile growth with caring for the environment through the intelligent, economic and clean re-use of materials, at the same time as limiting our consumption of raw materials, water and energy. Achieving that requires us to transcend the conventional waste management policies that have long structured our recycling industry, and introduce a new and essential requirement: materials recovery. We are then faced with a new challenge: reducing the complexity of our currently highly complex materials to enable the ultimate goal of materials recovery.
• How can we separate the component materials of our complex objects to simplify the sorting process?
• How can we extract the thin-layer rare earths and other strategic minerals from our discarded screens and laptops?
• How can we recover the gold and metals from our 99% plastic bank cards?
• How can we separate plastic, paper and aluminium from our food and drugs packaging without using chemical solutions or other energy-intensive and carbon-intensive techniques?
Xcrusher has been developed out of our commitment to delivering a solution for the recovery, decontamination and recycling of industrial waste, whether scrap or by-products, using only the physical properties of an electric arc and its shock wave.
Using electricity for recycling; electrons by the thousand to separate our waste into its constituent components… That’s where the underlying principles of Xcrusher technology lie. No chemicals, just the cold plasma generated by electromagnetic discharges, which allows us to recover indium from the LCD screens of our urban mines, recycle the carbon fibre from our aircraft and fishing rods… This initiative, which is the responsibility of every company, is just one part of a more global approach to sustainable management and is accompanied by an undeniable gain in competitiveness. Learning how to reuse our scrap and residual waste also means understanding how to conserve our natural resources and succeed in the challenge of creating a peaceful future for generations to come. Designed specifically to address these critical issues, Xcrusher makes it possible to reconcile these economic, environmental, social and regulatory imperatives.
our story
In the beginning,
Xcrusher was born out of the desire of its founders to develop civil applications out of military technology. On the basis of a memorandum of understanding signed in 2006 between a French defence manufacturer and Xcrusher SAS, our company was able to quickly acquire recognised expertise in the civil applications of very high-performance pulsed power sources. Several families of energy, mining and environmental patents allow it to base its expertise on innovations recognised by experts in the field. Today, the Xcrusher process covers applications in many fields confronted with the necessity of separating the constituent components present in the complex materials of everyday life. This separation is a crucial and essential step in recycling and material recovery.
“The more complex it is, the more effective it is to use Xcrusher as a physical process for separating out components for recycling.”
Xcrusher is also a powerful process for contactless fragmentation of products that require the removal of all cross-contamination during micronic, submicronic and nanometric grinding.
The research and development effort that lies behind Xcrusher has been funded and facilitated by public-private partnerships, with support from ADEME (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency) and the French government Investing for the Future (SGPI) programme to promote this technology and its potential for contributing to a circular economy.
After several years of research and development, Xcrusher technology has now reached the stage of industrial maturity in several applications, and today supports world leaders in addressing their recycling and recovery issues, contactless fragmentation, mining deposit reclamation and many other applications.
our organisation
A team commited
to open innovation
our base
The technological and experimental showcase for the Xcrusher Process
is located in the Val-de-Reuil, in France. This ambitious and ecologically
innovative facility forms part of the Soprema industrial site.
With its consciously contemporary and tightly controlled aesthetic, our building stands apart from more traditional structures in terms of its openness and prismatic form.
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