$9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
techxplore.com
techxplore.com
If you are started with a single product (say a lithium ion battery), then you might stand a chance of developing a process that can recover a reasonable fraction of the metals.
But if you’re starting with a general pile of a bunch of stuff (CRTS, batteries, hard drives, PCBs, cables), it’s very difficult to optimize a process that catches even a modest amount of the valuable stuff. The metals are fused with nonmetallic stuff like plastic and ceramics. And the useful metals often end up being “down cycled” into less valuable alloys because they are difficult or uneconomical to separate. If that’s hard to believe, just try to think through how you would economically extract gold, silver, and copper from 100 kg of PCBs.
And the reality is that most ewaste does not come in nicely separated. The options are 1) spend extra money to have people separate stuff, 2) possibly develop AI systems to separate stuff, 3) have consumers separate their own stuff, or 4) develop better chemical processes that can actually handle a mixture.
I have tried to work on #4 with not much success. If anyone else has worked on this and would like to share their experience, drop a note.
Edit: another commenter drew the analogy to ore refining, but that’s not correct. Ores are much more homogenous relative to ewaste. It would be like if PCBS contained copper fused onto plexiglass—sure, then it would be easy to get at the copper. But it’s not just those two things—-it’s 100 things all bound together.
Further searching on the company name has not been entirely encouraging but maybe I'm doing it wrong. There was a company called Changing World Technologies that I was very excited about that failed to deliver on its promises, so my enthusiasm is quite tempered.
InEnTec is the leading company in the space (as far as I can tell) because they have good scientific leadership, a good academic pedigree, and an investment by Waste Management.
The technology still has its challenges. It is hard to make it economical relative to alternatives, for one. I also think executives are not driving at the correct business model, overemphasizing syngas production and underemphasizing just getting rid of waste and possibly recovering metals.
But the biggest problem I see in terms of its viability for recycling is that it is all down cycling. Valuable and precious metals all end up in either a hugely challenging mixed alloy, or they get wasted in the vitrified slag output.
I have been trying to find someone who can clarify if any progress has been made on this.
It obviously needs to be economically viable to pursue, but should be worthy of subsidies to help it find its footing--we'll all be well-served by having better recycling options.
If you learn anything more about this please share!
Turns out that's not the case at all, they can literally just throw stuff in and crush it and at least have a moderately easy time getting the raw materials of batteries out. Made me feel a little more optimistic about things.
It’s not that surprising because it is all about extracting a few very precious metals that are fairly concentrated but mixed in with much of the periodic table.
https://elcanindustries.com/blog_posts/black-mass-recovery-p...
It is a painful and drawn-out process to fail as a small business. Unless you have lived it, you probably dont know. That whole opportunity in E*Waste was bungled IMHO, and now much larger, much more impactful ecological processes are the priority. Your fresh water ways and heavy metals accumulation in the food chain, are ugly sores from the consumer electronics fiesta.
notice that it skips quickly in the description from "the intent" to CED (covered electronic devices). Well, the tonnage stats they point to are exactly because it is big, old livingroom television sets that are being collected as Covered Electronic Devices. Those program numbers skip many details about program implementation. This info page is written by people on salary for decades.
test -- walk to any public shopping area in California and look around on the ground and along the paved areas. Notice the amount of consumer electronics you see as ground waste.
[0] https://www.cawrecycles.org/californias-existing-e-waste-rec...
>>The study also found that 950 million kilograms of cables with recyclable copper were thrown away last year, enough to circle Earth 107 times.
The question is whether this is economical ore
Doubt; there's a huge e-waste industry, going all the way down to people breaking things apart with rocks. Same with the cabling, while it gets discarded, most of it doesn't go to waste, that doesn't make economic sense. The cables get stripped or burnt and the copper sold / reused.
The metals are not being overlooked, the e-waste doesn't just go to landfill; it's just expensive and/or dangerous and/or left to low wage workers to do, for limited returns. There's at best a few grams of valuable metal in a smartphone; gold is used but it's in miniscule amounts.
The Vimes boots/e-waste theory of poverty. Poor countries throwing useful resources away because they can't afford to set up recycling schemes.