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Business

For this process we considered a list of different e-waste materials from mobile phones to PC equipment and TVs, and their different metal compositions. Consulting the prices in the market of Au, Ag, Cu, Ni and the different compositions, we estimated a price for each e-waste component. After this, we made calculations to obtain an average of all e-waste components, getting an expected price per kg of e-waste of $188 MXN.

Expecting a 30,000 ton monthly production and an 80% real efficiency, we considered the following annual costs: salaries (for 183 people) of 24,147,200 MXN; manufacturing costs of 35,841,960 MXN; materials and reagents (including culture medium) of 12,696,480 MXN, and transport of 50% of total production costs. The terrain and construction of the plant is estimated approximately in 70,000,000 MXN with 4,300 m\(^2\), taxes (16% IVA) of $361,695,770 and $6,000,000 in publicity. The not calculated costs include bioreactors and other equipment and their maintenance for a 10,000,000 Lt/month flux (13,889 Lt/hr), a more precise proportion of types of incoming e-waste, and other costs.

Excluding the last information, the total expected income in this process raises to $2,160,000,000 MXN ($108,260,000 dollars) per year. At the end of the year, the total of earnings remains in $879,690,000 MXN, or $43,983,000 dollars.

Entrepreneurship

We created the following canvas and we presented it to the executive board of CVR. We are currently negotiating the future research to create value to the company.

Also, we identified all the weaknesses and threats, as well as our strenghts and opportunities in the next SWOT.

According to the Executive Board of CVR (An electronic waste company located in Nuevo León, México), the costs of proper collection and recycling of e-waste exceed the revenues generated from the recovered materials due to the complexity of separating them. With our system, we will create profit for a self-sustainable industry. We have successfully developed an alliance with CVR, who agreed to provide us all the material for the scale-up of our technology. We are currently working with the National Technology Transfer Office of our Institution on creating a provisional patent for our three-step bioleaching process. Our team will continue after iGEM competition until the e-waste bioleaching company is founded.