Recycling e-waste could be a golden opportunity

By 2033, more than 1 billion laptops, cell phones, and other electronic devices could end up in the U.S. waste stream each year.

That’s according to a new study in Sustainable nature predicts a significant increase in the number and complexity of the United States waste electronics in the next decade. If not recycled properly, this runoff is a growing cause of environmental concern as it contains many hazardous materialsaccording to study co-authors Peng Peng and Arman Shehabi, two scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Laboratory).

However, with better end-of-life management, Peng and Shehabi’s study shows that e-waste can also be a valuable source of metals, specifically gold, that can benefit future economy by offsetting the growing demand for virgin mining.

In this Q&A session, researchers discuss the scale of the e-waste problem in the United States and the potential for diverse management solutions across the country.

Peng Peng is a research scientist in the Sustainable Energy Systems Group in the Department of Energy and Environmental Impact Analysis (EAEI) at Berkeley Lab.

Arman Shehabi is a staff scientist in the EAEI Division of the Energy Technology Area at Berkeley Lab.

Q. How big is the current e-waste problem?

man: The number of discarded electronics is growing rapidly and in some ways makes sense if you think about it intuitively. We just have more and more electric devices in our lives. Many of them have a short lifespan. In our estimation, we find that in the US alone, projections have shown that there is a ballpark of one billion devices that will be discarded annually in the US by the end of this decade.

One of the big problems is that we don’t really have the right system or infrastructure to properly separate these electronic devices and reuse the different components contained in them, because so they’re actually landfilled or shipped to another country for recycling. A lot of times that recycling is not done in accordance with appropriate health regulations and can expose people to some of the hazardous materials in those electronic devices.

Peng: If you look at the increase in the number of electronic devices from 2010 to now, the number created globally has doubled.

The idea of ​​a circular economy, which is finding ways to reuse valuable materials in e-waste, has attracted a lot of attention recently, but one of the problems from a recycling is that we don’t really have good predictions about what. the composition of that waste will be in the future as it is changing quite rapidly. There is a lag between the type of equipment manufactured and the type of equipment entering the waste stream, which makes it difficult to predict the type of equipment that will need to be recycled.

Q. How can the results of your research help solve the problem of e-waste?

Peng: There is a lot of uncertainty associated with it, but what we have shown is that the amount of gold that is thrown away every year in electronic devices in the United States is probably equivalent to the amount of gold mined in the country. . We particularly consider the value of extracting gold from electronics because gold is the most valuable metal you can get from them.

man: For our analysis, we compiled a variety of data sources looking at sales of various electronic devices in the United States. We specifically focus on consumer electronics only because on a metric basis represent the largest waste stream. We’ve tied expected growth in electronics sales to life expectancy estimates for various electronic devices, and studies have analyzed different electronic devices for analysis. material components in such electronic devices.

And from there we can connect different electronic devices with different sized integrated circuits, and then those different sized integrated circuits with heavy metal or gold component of circuit.

Peng: Another important part of the paper is that we showed that if, in theory in the United States, all crude oil refineries started refining metals from electronics, they would have production capacity to do that. One potential problem, however, is that the majority of U.S. gold refining facilities are located primarily in Nevada and Alaska.

Theoretically, we found that we could ship all the metals recovered from e-waste to these refineries in Nevada or Alaska, but shipping them from across the US to those places really create a lot of economic and environmental burden. Our work shows that if we focus on building facilities across the country to recover metals from these waste electronics in various locations, we can actually reduce the economic and environmental burden associated with this transportation.

Q. Looking ahead, what needs to be done to make your solution viable?

Peng: One of the problems we had with doing this study was that the disparity between different studies on what was in these electronic devices was quite large. So depending on the person performing the experiment and the type of brand, year of use of the electronics, etc., there can be significant differences between the number of printed circuit boards, the plastics in the electronics, and the gold. or other metals within them.

To help us narrow down this uncertainty, it would be really helpful for electronics manufacturers to include the composition of what’s in their electronics without exposing their intellectual property. Recyclers can then understand how much metal is in these electronics.

man: If every electronic device had some kind of ingredient label that could tell us what was inside, it would be easier to aggregate them and move them across the country to the ideal location to refine them, based on on their content. Having manufacturers work a little more closely with refiners end-to-end in this process will also make it easier to ensure that they have the raw material handling capacity and are optimizing recycling facilities. their regime.

Another important area of ​​opportunity for future research is on the type of refining currently being carried out. Most of it is based on virgin mining, and researchers need to continue to make progress on newer mining techniques that could be better positioned for electronics recycling.

Q. What do you anticipate will happen if no other measures are taken to solve this problem?

Peng: So I think if nothing is done for this, we will definitely face shortage of important metal material from raw material sources. And the environmental issues associated with e-waste are going to get more and more complicated as all these different types of electronics are much smaller and more dynamic than they were 10 years ago. I think this could be a very serious problem.

man: I think if nothing changes we will see an increase in the amount of e-waste generated in the US and without the infrastructure to grow accordingly, that e-waste could may be transferred abroad or to other countries and that places dependence on other countries to take care of Waste of electricity. We will also throw away a lot of valuable documents or just give them away.

I think that as we are moving towards a digital society where we have more and more electronic devices in our daily life, the materials used to manufacture electronic devices will be increasingly more and more demand. So if we can find a better way to extract and keep parts of those materials at the end of their life, that will help enable the economy to grow while minimizing stress on the environment.