End-of-life Catalytic Converters. What happens to the precious metals? Don Weatherbee, RegenX

We're not recycling it. We're regenerating, we're turning it right back into the raw material that it was before it was ever used.

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What happens to platinum group metals from end of life catalytic converters? Do we keep mining and mining and mining until these precious minerals are depleted? Well, there's an impact on our planet, as we know, with mining, as well as losing natural resources. Well, precious metals aren't something that I ever, really, ever previously considered.

But through this podcast, I've gained insights into how precious metals, yes, indeed, precious metals, and how these metals can be recycled, I guess, repurposed, I suppose. But what are the implications, and can certain metals actually be extracted from, in this case, diesel catalytic converters, and then recycled and reused?

Well, today's awesome guest is dedicated to advancing environmentally responsible recovery and recycling of platinum group metals, commonly referred to as PGMs, from end of life catalytic converters. His company, REGEN X.TECH is well regarded for its clean technology. All of this will be elaborated upon as my guest shares his remarkable positive imprints and loads of information for you.

And I'm thrilled to welcome the CEO and congratulations. This is a new. a task, new assignment, new beginning for him at Regen X Tech. Don Weatherby, welcome to the show. Welcome, Don. Well,

I would love to hear first , about you, and you are from Canada in one of my favorite Places in the world.

And then moved to an oil sands contract miner. , for about 15 years. So, a broad history of of mining experience. And started with the Regenexx forebearer company. Which we were just naturally going to go into being, we were a junior exploration company. So, one of these mining companies that goes and finds new deposits

that can be developed into mines and that. So, started there thinking that, well, that would be continuation of mining. But we had funds from the sale of an asset and started looking around saying, well, can we find another property or is there something else we should be doing? And we came across a processing technology and that process technology was intended to recover gold from old tailings piles.

So gold that wasn't economic back 50, 100 years ago, sitting around in these waste piles. And we started working down that path and. When you start working in a path, different opportunities jump up, and because people start to hearing that you're doing processing of a certain type, we were asked if we could process e waste, and we started in that, but e waste is quite challenging because every different load is a different type, meaning you have different materials in it made up of different things, so it's a complicated piece to, to recycle.

While we were doing the e waste, a group out of the U. S., a scrap dealer, , asked us about the ability we could have to extract the PGMs from catalytic converters, because he was finding he had access to a bunch of catalytic converters, especially in the diesel side. that weren't being able to be recycled.

I never, I ever thought that anything like that could be recycled I guess repurposing,

is effectively the second muffler. It's a metal sheathed, um, piece of longer exhaust system. So inside that metal component compartment, is a honeycomb. That, that honeycomb is coated with platinum and palladium, and the honeycomb is built as a structure. The concept is that you need the air to flow over the most surfaces you can to create the chemical reactions to convert the harmful gases to the less harmful. it came about mainly started in the 70s because if people around from that time frame, the cities were just clogged and smog and smog was the, the cause of, from the, mainly from the automobiles.

And the catalytic converters were brought in to, to eliminate smog. And they did so. They did the smog gases and changed it to mainly carbon dioxide. And that's why I say it's a less harmful gas. It's still not perfect, but it is better than it was with the smog. So, that honeycomb, with the plating on it, for gasoline engines, it's made of uh, particularly ceramic.

And the diesel engines, it's a silicon carbide. And so, the smelters, can melt the ceramic easily. They have issues with the silicon carbide. So that's why they don't want that stream. So the vast majority of current recycling is done by just melting it , in high temperature furnaces. And our process is a chemical process, hydrometallurgical.

And so it avoids the, the need for the burning of the material.

I've had people on here who melt glass. And what that looks like. So now this is very different. And what about the. People who were there on site. Are there any health hazards with the high temperatures and the melting?

So there's a about 1, 500 kilograms of CO2 created from every ton of material processed in a smelter. So that's the, that's the releasing of, of the burning sections. And PGMs, PGMs on a melted basis look almost exactly like gold, just in a silver metallic. Um, color. So platinum, palladium, they're all in that metallic silvery type side.

than gold, and so it's not that it doesn't melt, it just means the temperature has to be and the, the torch that a jeweler has doesn't go to that temperature.

He has always had requests from his clients. Is there a home for my diesel? And so we're the offshoot so that he can collect the diesel catalytic converters and bring them into the supply chain.

If, if it's commercial and he's purchasing from commercial, why is there theft? Are people selling? These to companies or are they putting I don't understand why there's theft

And so up to the levels of refiners and smelters, they have to be able to prove the providence of the materials that are coming into them. And so each level has to then know your customer. We've actually had to turn down, , some orders that we, people have wanted to send to us because they couldn't prove where the materials came from.

So that's a whole section that's being tried to push the The black market out of the stream because none of us want the black market there. Doesn't do us any good. There's enough of the regular market to to keep us in business, and we want people to to have the useful life that they get from their from the catalytic converters and there's no need for any of the black market stuff to come into our business stream.

I'll step back though, one thing. So we don't do the melting. Our process, that's the smelters, and that's with the gasoline.

What we do is a chemical leach, that we put our materials into a chemical leach, which then The chemistry extracts the metals from the substrate, once we've got that, we can take another chemical process and it drops the liquid version back into a solid. So, we're doing what's called hydrometallurgical, , process, and they're doing a thermal process in the smelters.

The base chemistry has been around for a long time. It's how you make it work and like we like to talk about. When we started down this path we had

two issues to take care of. We had a chemistry issue to make sure we could understand how the chemistry worked and have it be effective. But then we had a process, a physical mechanical issue. Because like I talked about, you're moving, you're changing states of materials. Sometimes it's a solid type, sometimes it's liquid.

So, so all that movement of material is a whole other section of the technology that needed to be Accomplished so that makes this commercially viable.

At the end of our process, we have a product that is effectively a commodity grade precious metal. So what we like to sort of highlight is that just like with our name, we're regenerating the product.

We're not recycling it. We're regenerating, we're turning it right back into the raw material that it was before it was ever used. And so, it can then be used for the exact same purpose. As the material that's coming out of the ground from a mine and it's a big difference than your traditional recycling in that your traditional recycling, give an example of that white piece of paper

you've got well, that white piece of paper when you recycle it doesn't come back as white paper. It comes back as a brown cardboard. And so each step on the majority of recycling is converting it to an inferior product. What we're doing, Okay. Is regenerating it right back to the original raw material that can be used for whatever.

Yeah.

. We, right now, we sell it just straight into the international commodity market.

We're building a, a process that have the same, same sort of system where they would send us their cores, we would process them and return the metal to the automotive companies to then rebuild, re, redo catalytic converters.

We're part of what we like to refer to as urban mining and into that sector is that the urban mining is out there looking for ways to regenerate. Sort of raw materials from from items that are, that are, have been processed and the automobile is one of the best examples that's currently happening because for as much as we see, is that a large chunk of the current auto is actually recycled, like most of the steel, all those pieces that are coming in are actually hitting the recycling chain at this time.

We do see that there's some potential for some other areas, um, potentially back in the e waste, potentially in those types. But our first focus is there's a large need in this catalytic converter and a large growth profile for us just even in this niche sector before we might start moving into other pieces.

PGMs right now are trading at about 1, 000 an ounce each. So they're highly valuable, and so even small amounts, can generate the returns that are needed to fund the operations.

, we look at it as two sources. . Um, is that we're proud of what we're doing and that it's green and that it's, it's a niche into where we can go.

Green initiatives only get to grow if they're also economic. And so we have to show that we can do this economically to increase the footprint of being able to do the good green work at the same time.

Our green footprint.

We are fairly manageable. I mean, we're in a small area. Where we get to have to do this, we can do it inside, so all those pieces allow us to be fairly, uh, environmental. And we have no emissions when it comes through so it makes it very nice on that side

Is Tennessee is a great distribution hub on the eastern seaboard. It's along the lines of major, um, transportation corridors that it allows effective shipping of these materials because we can't just go locally. We have to grab from a larger area, but having ourselves located in Tennessee is a great advantage on reducing the shipping that's required to bring all this product to us.

Um, just for an example. Tennessee is where, , FedEx had their first distribution hub and that's where they made it for a central hub that allowed them to bring everything in at night and send it back out the next morning and be able to deliver stuff overnight. So that's how central Tennessee is to to a distribution hub on the eastern seaboard of the U. S.

We're starting up, we're, we're ready to grow. We're moving forward in what our plan is.

We've had some hiccups, but we're, we're doing a one of a kind, first of a kind process. And we're very proud of where we've gotten to and how quickly we've gotten to this point.

And I'd say that's also, our team has been immensely, , responsible for that our ability to

to make those those adjustments and, and move forward with our product.

orientated to get us operating efficiently.

We're fairly small. We've got 12 people. We're doing this with 12 people at this point in time.

this can grow. This can grow. It'll take a few years. But I'm so thrilled to hear about how it is regenerated and that it can be regenerated and It's it's exciting.

And if we're truly to, to move forward, we have to stop attacking each other and start collaborating and figuring out how to move forward because people who are in certain industries they'll be defensive, they'll be scared of what transitions mean, and if they're attacked, they just sort of don't look to cooperate, and what we've got to do is not look at how we demonize sectors, but at how we help transition to move to different, um, ideas.

And so that's where I can hope, is I can hope that we can have a lot more collaborative dialogues than attacking dialogues.

I appreciate you so much, and good luck, and let's get this spreading.

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