$NZ60m to ramp up e-waste recycling

Sydney private equity firm Liverpool Partners has led a $NZ60 million Series C capital raising round in New Zealand-founded e-waste recycling company Mint Innovation.   

Liverpool Partners’ investment has come from its impact investing strategy Inspire Impact. The investment has made Liverpool Partners the third largest shareholder in Mint with a 13.67% stake. The company’s two largest shareholders are New Zealand venture firms Icehouse Ventures and Movac.

After developing its technology and building a demonstration plant in Auckland, Mint Innovation set up its first commercial scale plant in western Sydney last year supported by a $4.2 million Australian federal government grant. The plant will start accepting e-waste from April and will then progressively ramp up processing. The plant has been designed to process 4,000 tonnes a year, adequate to serve all of Australia at current demand level. New Zealand was seen as too small to provide enough volume on its own.

Mint Innovation’s expansion plan involves quickly developing multiple additional plants in other countries, most likely starting in the UK.

Mint Innovation was co-founded in 2016 by former employee of waste-gasses-to-chemicals company LanzaTech Dr Will Barker and and Oliver Crush. Barker is now chief executive and Crush chief scientific officer.

Barker said Mint Innovation had been trying to raise new capital since March last year. The team had initially targeted raising $US60 million but lowered that figure as reduced values of listed technology companies flowed on to unlisted companies.

Barker declined to say what valuation the new investment put on the company but said it was a three to four times increase over the last round. He was also confident that the funding will be adequate to carry the business through to profitability, with the next raise then likely to be an IPO.

Mint Innovation recovers precious metals from e-waste by a process it calls bio-metallurgy. Printed circuit boards are crushed and then precious metals including gold, palladium and platinum are dissolved using the company’s proprietary chemistry. Other metals, such as copper, are recovered using a conventional electrochemical process.

The company plans to sell the recovered metals back to electronic equipment manufacturers, creating a circular economy while also removing toxic materials from the waste stream.

Image: Mint Innovation’s hammer mill used to break up printed circuit boards.