The HOLY GRAIL for the metal processing sector is to remove toxic emissions;lower energy and reduce water use, while delivering high recoveries and fast kinetics and returning any waste back into the Circular Economy. We believe Vinca is THE technology to meet all these global ambitions.
Vinca is developing a transformational clean, safe, sustainable, non-toxic non-aqueous molten salt critical mineral extraction process, delivering excellent metal recovery results (90-99%) across the full complement of valuable precious and base metals, driven by fast kinetics (<7hrs) and a simple flow sheet. Vinca stands alone in its field of scientific endeavour, with 3 granted US patents evidencing its NOVELTY, while protecting its future path to commercialisation.
Vinca aims to improve the shortcomings plaguing hydrometallurgical toxic chemical leaching and pyrometallurgical high heat / toxic slag smelting extraction processes. Hence why we call Vinca “the 3rd Force in Metallurgy”. Vinca uses neither toxic lixiviants or ultra-high temperatures and produces no toxic wet or dry tailings wastes. Vinca’s residual dry inert tailings solids can be repurposed into the circular economy as construction aggregate.
Vinca’s key advantage is capturing multiple precious and base metals, such as gold, silver, palladium, platinum, cobalt, copper and nickel, during a single leach circuit;reducing flow sheet complexities for polymetallic ore deposits, while in turn improving the development economics for multi-metal orebodies. Being non-aqueous enables Vinca to bypass the typical passivation issues encountered processing single/double refractory ore bodies, generating higher recoveries.
Vinca can also unlock metal values in countries where toxic chemicals, such as CN and Hg, have already been banned. By reducing the scale of impact, Vinca also expects to improve community engagements, enable easier permitting pathways and deliver faster market entry, in an era when critical metal supplies are increasingly constrained and the industry’s social licence to operate is suffering significant pushback against negative pollution impacts on air, water and soil natural resources.
Vinca’s route to market is two-fold, with the ability to build a large-scale single mine facility. Equally, Vinca’s standardised processing parameters are ideally suited to building processing hubs to aggregate regional materials mined by artisanal and smaller scale projects. The Vinca vision is to be processing all global precious-containing greenfield polymetallic orebodies by 2030.
It is an honour to be the Recipient of the IMARC Ascent Village Startup prize for this 2022 conference and we look forward to showcasing our Vinca innovations to you.
