Recovery of precious metal catalysts with supercritical water oxidation

Incineration is the traditional method used to recover precious metals from spent catalysis, but it has a number of drawbacks, particularly from an environmental point of view. Now a British-Swedish joint venture, involving Chematur Engineering AB and Johnson Matthey, has developed a process that uses supercritical water oxidation to recover the precious metals. The technology, called AquaCat(R), offers organic destruction efficiencies of close to 100%, but without any of the problems associated with incineration.