Electronic waste is a gold mine waiting to be tapped
In the dark corners of your attic shelves or the depths of your desk drawers likely sits a collection of defunct laptops, cameras, and gaming consoles. The phone you may be reading this on will probably join that junk pile once it becomes obsolete or its screen cracks.
The average person in the US threw away 21 kg of electronics in 2022, while the average person in Norway—the country with the highest per-capita e-waste—threw away 27 kg. Those numbers are close to the weight range of a pit bull, and the numbers add up. Globally, people discarded a record 62 million metric tons (t) of electronics, according to the United Nations’ recent Global E-waste Monitor 2024 report. That’s the weight of over 1.7 million fully loaded semitrailer trucks, which, if lined up bumper to bumper, would reach almost around the equator.
And that trash contains treasure. Metals made up half the world’s electronic trash, or e-waste, in 2022 and were worth $91 billion. Copper, iron, and gold accounted
for a big chunk of that value. E-waste also contains aluminum, platinum, and rare earth elements such as neodymium, which are critical for the batteries and wind turbines needed to transition the world to green energy.
Mining these metals destroys habitats, pollutes soil and water, produces heaps of waste, and is linked to human rights abuses. Plus, the global supply of some metals is geopolitically shaky. Using urban mining—the recovery of materials from waste—to reclaim valuable metals from e-waste would alleviate these issues. It would enable the circular use of materials and help meet demand for critical metals. It would also prevent the emission of 52 million t of mining-related greenhouse gases.
Interest in recovering metals from e-waste has soared in recent years, says Morgan Evans, an environmental scientist at Battelle Memorial Institute, an independent R&D organization. Many emerging technologies show promise, but to be successful, they will have to have low environmental impact and be scalable. “Many of these technologies work well on the bench, but put them in a pilot reactor, and they don’t perform,” she says. A tunable system “that’s semiagnostic to what you put into it” would also be vital.
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