INDUSTRIAL
Recovering critical materials to save the planet
Peter Keeley-Lopez, senior process applications engineer at Tetronics explores how urban mining technologies provide a more sustainable and ethical alternative to primary extraction
E
very day, vast volumes of critical resources, precious metals, minerals and chemicals, are thrown away. Inefficient waste management, consumer behaviour and a lack of awareness means that some of these materials only have a single-use life, when they could be recovered and their value put back into the economy.
The World Economic Forum estimates that just 20 per cent of global e-waste is recycled, while the other 80 per cent ends up in landfill or is incinerated. Among this waste is a significant amount of ‘critical materials’ – including high value metals like gold, silver, platinum and lithium that are widely used in PCs, laptops, mobile phones and batteries. But not everything is thrown away. Many of us have older devices, which incidentally usually have larger amounts of precious metals in them, languishing in kitchen drawers or in under stairs cupboards as a ‘just in case’ back-up or waiting to be dealt with. The so-called ‘urban mines’ in homes across the UK can contain around 50 times the concentration of critical metals than original sources – and are far less hazardous to harvest, if you know how.
24 NOVEMBER 2022 | ELECTRONICS TODAY
The UK government has recognised the value of urban mining and in July 2022 launched a Policy Paper, Resilience for the future: The UK’s critical minerals strategy. It calls for us to make better use of what we have by accelerating the recovery, recycling and reuse of critical minerals and components to alleviate pressure on primary sources in the ground. Ironically, an unintended consequence of the Net Zero drive towards a safer, sustainable planet is an increase in demand for critical
materials like lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite. These are essential for the batteries and permanent magnets used in wind turbines and electric vehicles.
Relying on primary sources to extract the volume of materials we are going to need to achieve the energy transition is problematic for many reasons. Critical materials are typically mined from a small number of countries or sites. The current energy crisis has shown us that it is unwise to rely heavily on resources from a single supplier – whether for gas or gold. Some of the regions where materials are mined are politically unstable, often because of the high value of the materials concerned, leading to the idea of ‘war minerals’.
Then there is the cost. Critical minerals are expensive to extract from primary sources and may come with a high human or ethical price tag. What’s more, they involve processing large volumes of extraneous ore to achieve relatively small amounts of the required materials, compared to the concentration of materials in devices that are no longer in use. While there is a great deal of critical material in circulation that is embedded in equipment
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