HP is mining its own e-waste to build its latest laptops

"What HP is effectively doing is mining e-waste of their own appliances. They're taking responsibility for their full supply chain to turn it into the next generation of devices. Old circuit boards are shredded and run through a series of tanks containing custom biological materials that pull out metals like gold and copper."

"The biosorption process works like a magnet, using electrons to attract specific elements. When gold is dissolved, for example, and electrons are stripped from its surface, it's drawn to biological matter with extra electrons. Gold is the economic enabler for the process: if you don't recover the gold, you don't make any profit."

"In the U.S. right now, we're about a million tons short on copper. Copper is required for every single bit of the energy transition. It's required for the data centers that we're building. So that gap is only going to grow. The HPs and Apples and other OEMs are all looking for sustainable copper."

HP has partnered with Australian startup Mint Innovation to establish a closed-loop recycling system where copper from old HP computers and servers is recovered and reused in new HP laptops. The process uses biosorption, a chemical and biological method that replaces traditional furnace-based smelting, making it more sustainable and less polluting. Circuit boards are shredded and processed through tanks containing custom biological materials that extract valuable metals like gold, copper, silver, tin, and palladium. Gold recovery makes the process economically viable, enabling subsequent metal extraction. Copper is particularly critical due to current supply shortages in the U.S., with demand growing across the energy transition, data centers, and electronics manufacturing sectors.

Read at Fast Company