The ALKU team was accompanied by a camera team working for the "Galileo" science programme as part of the Pro7 TV station’s environmental focus month. The focus of the report was on electronic scrap and how it is recycled.

Here anyone who missed the programme will find a link.

About the video: Goldsucher im Müll ('Prospecting in waste') – ALKU on Galileo

The report shows three specialists who consider what others see as rubbish to be very valuable. One of the three is Matthias Lang, Managing Director of ALKU GmbH, who is also called the "high-tech recycler". He specialises in the disposal of electronic scrap. The beginning of the film shows the various types of components such as a pile of circuit boards, computers, hard drives and mobile phones. Matthias Lang then demonstrates what the so-called waste contains: silver, palladium and gold in the circuit boards and rare earths such as indium and tantalum in the mobile phones. The warehouse at ALKU GmbH also holds exceptional electronic scrap since even cardiac pacemakers come here to be recycled as they must be replaced every six to eight years. Around 20 shipments are delivered to the company every day – the report shows the arrival by 26-tonne lorry of computer scrap from an office liquidation operation. The items are then sorted by trained staff, initially manually and then using an excavator. Matthias Lang points out that the materials must always be examined extremely carefully as there are ways of cheating. Precious metals are extracted from the circuit board using solvents in a process known as "leaching"; it takes a trained eye to identify them. Assistant foreman Christian Rustler demonstrates how a computer is taken apart and subsequently disassembled into its individual components. The most valuable of these parts are the circuit boards and memory chips. Finally, foreman Korbinian Schneider shows how the mobile shredder is operated. It is used to render scrap material unusable for reasons of data and/or production protection. At the end of the film a shot of the facility from above shows the exemplary manner in which work is performed at the company. Even though waste is processed here, cleanliness and tidiness are the order of the day.