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.