A mining shell that has been sitting in trading purgatory for more than two years reckons it has finally struck gold with a move into e-waste.

Esperance Minerals quietly put out an ASX announcement this afternoon saying that it had received shareholder approval to change the company’s name to E3Sixty. As of Wednesday December 11 the company will trade under the code E3S, developing e-waste processing projects in Sri Lanka, amongst a range of other projects.

It caps off a torturous few years for the former gold miner, which had been been on the hunt for gold in Kununurra in 2014 before allowing that project to lapse.

Since then, it had been on the lookout for “projects or assets that will create shareholder value”.

Such ideas have included further resources projects and research into the Asian health and wellness business sector.

In August 2015 it was going to acquire an e-commerce business called eDutyFree; by December 9 that had been terminated. On December 15 it wanted to acquire a Chinese agri-food business called Goyes; by March 2016 that acquisition, too, had been terminated.

It spent 2016 assessing its options in the health care industry but in September the ASX finally had had enough, suspending it from quotation until it could “demonstrate compliance” with the bourse’s many listing rules.

In December 2016 the company raised shareholder hopes yet again with news it would acquire “urban mining” company Greenenz, which has developed a process for the extraction of high concentrations of precious metals such as gold, silver and palladium from e-waste in an “environmentally-friendly manner”.

And now, finally, nearly exactly two years later, it says the deal “will create long-term shareholder value”.

“Given that we are rapidly approaching the end of the calendar year, and based on market feedback, the board has taken the decision to aim for late January 2019 for the prospectus with a pre-IPO capital raising to be undertaken in November 2019,” it told investors.

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