Two former Next Generation Data (NGD) executives have joined e-waste business Network 2 Supplies (n2s) and its bioleaching subsidiary Bioscope Technologies.

NGD co-founder Simon Taylor has been appointed as chairman of the UK-based company, and director of Bioscope. Former NGD CEO Nick Razey will become chairman of Bioscope. Both are major investors in the company.

After growing to become Europe's largest data center, NGD was sold to Vantage in 2020 for $800 million. The Newport, Wales, campus counts Microsoft Azure as a major customer.

"n2s’s zero-waste approach to addressing the tech sector’s exponential e-waste challenges offers a truly world-class circular recycling solution to large consumers of business IT equipment," Taylor said.

"The significant market potential for the business is underlined by the tripling of sales turnover in the last three years and a growing blue chip client list."

The company handles IT lifecycle management and recycling, including data center decommissioning and precious metal recovery.

Traditional e-waste processing can still lead to significant waste, which Taylor told DCD that the company hopes to solve with Bioscope.

"We use water and bacteria, which solubilizes all of the precious and rare earth metals from a circuit board - that was our skunkworks experiment, we've now got to a position where we're industrializing the process," he said.

"We'll build one of these plants, hopefully, in Scotland, Wales, and two or three in England."

The company is "in the process of going from scalable testing to commercial viability."

Each type of equipment would go through its own series of bacteria and filtering stages - so, for example, only a specific Cisco router mulch would be processed in one tank. "The utopia would be that you could take absolutely take anything and put this in a mix, but that's probably a long time away," Taylor said.

"You've got to change your bacteria mix to get your copper and your silver out of the slush," he added. "Every time you add a metal like a palladium or nickel to the mix you've got to vary the bacterial mix, and then we have to oscillate and stir these tanks continually in line with a variety of bacteria that are placed in them."

BT's 2022 environmental report noted that the telecoms company recovered 455kg of metals in partnership with Bioscope.

Colt partnered with n2s for a bioleaching trial in 2021.