$9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
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$9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: $9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
#2Here in California, SB20 was supposed to address this, 15 years ago.. but without explanation, the bill disappeared into closed session run personally by CA Senator Byron Sher of Palo Alto, and they re-wrote it completely to simpley make a "bottle deposit" on new displays sold retail, with the funds applied to recycle old CRT TVs (edit). The State of California is the fund manager. The entire system worked about as well as you might think. Many, many small recyclers tried to participate and went out of business due to costs with insufficient reimbursement.
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.
Re: $9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
#3One of many similar sentences in TFA:
>>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
Re: $9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
#4$9.5B worldwide is peanuts. Likely it's not worth to recycle (could even cost more than you get back), from a pure economic perspective.
Re: $9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
#5One of many similar sentences in TFA: >>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
Depends on the local context. In South Africa, some people are desperate enough to steal live copper wire, let alone harvest waste.
Re: $9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
#6> But the materials are squandered because this "invisible" waste is thrown away rather than recycled
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.
Re: $9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
#7During a can't-sleep youtube session, I came across a video that explains how lithium-ion battery recycling works. I previously thought everything had to be disassembled, making recycling prohibitively impractical.
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.
Re: $9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
#8During a can't-sleep youtube session, I came across a video that explains how lithium-ion battery recycling works. I previously thought everything had to be disassembled, making recycling prohibitively impractical. 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 opt…
It makes sense when you think about mining. Mining is not just lifting chunks of metal out of holes in the ground. The product of mining is ore, which then has to be refined. The percentage of the desired metal in ore can be less than the percentage of lithium in a battery. So a battery is just a different kind of ore that needs refining.
Re: $9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
#9Here in California, SB20 was supposed to address this, 15 years ago.. but without explanation, the bill disappeared into closed session run personally by CA Senator Byron Sher of Palo Alto, and they re-wrote it completely to simpley make a "bottle deposit" on new displays sold retail, with the funds applied to recycle old CRT TVs ( edit ). The State of California is the fund manager. The entire system worked about as…
this is a page from a professional lobby in Sacramento, summarizing (spin) the progress in California recycling electronics.[0]
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...
Re: $9.5B of key metals in overlooked electronic waste: UN
#10During a can't-sleep youtube session, I came across a video that explains how lithium-ion battery recycling works. I previously thought everything had to be disassembled, making recycling prohibitively impractical. 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 opt…
It makes sense when you think about mining. Mining is not just lifting chunks of metal out of holes in the ground. The product of mining is ore, which then has to be refined. The percentage of the desired metal in ore can be less than the percentage of lithium in a battery. So a battery is just a different kind of ore that needs refining.
I am amused that very similar chemistry is involved with battery recycling as in reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, both “hydrometallurgy” that involves dissolving it all in nitric acid and doing acid-base extractions with solvents and “pyrometallurgy” with molten salts.
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...