Zakład Działalności Innowacyjnej “INNOVATOR” Sp. z o.o., headquartered in Gliwice (ul. Sowińskiego 5), is an engineering company whose sole shareholder is the Łukasiewicz Research Network – Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals. The company is registered in the Polish National Court Register under KRS 0000055884, and its principal activity is the production of precious metals. It was established in 1997 by transforming an innovation and implementation unit operating since 1987, and from the outset it has transferred technologies developed at the Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals to industry and run its own production and services based on them.
Its core business is the refining and recovery of precious metals – gold, silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium and iridium – from industrial scrap and waste and from individual suppliers; its first recovery plant was commissioned in 1988. The company supplies pure precious metals (including Ag 99.99% silver, Au 99.99% gold, and platinum, palladium and rhodium sponge), silver and gold semi-finished products – sheets, strips, rods, wires, tubes and anodes – and precious metal compounds. It also makes lead and tin products, anodes, bearing, solder and low-melting alloys, silver-plated and tinned copper wire, copper, brass and bronze wire, and bimetallic contact rivets. Since 2005 it has manufactured IF-type flotation machines, designed by teams at the Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals, for non-ferrous ore and coal beneficiation plants in Poland and for export to China, Serbia and Kazakhstan.
Its links with non-ferrous metals and recycling run through the company’s entire profile: from buying and refining scrap containing precious metals, through a technology for recycling rhenium from superalloy scrap, developed with Łukasiewicz – IMN and introduced in 2014, which yields ammonium perrhenate and rhenium alloys and compounds, to supplying ore beneficiation machinery. The company reports having completed 124 projects, delivering 611 flotation cells with a total volume of 22,424 m³. As an IGMNiR member, INNOVATOR represents precious metal recovery and refining and the industrial implementation of technologies from the Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals.