Abstract
The use of special and precious metals has accelerated significantly over the past 30 years, and their sufficient future availability is crucial for clean technologies and other high-tech equipment. Recycling contributes to secure access to these metals, conserve metal resources, mitigate potential temporary scarcities, and reduce the climate impact of metal production. While today efficient metallurgical processes exist to recover base and precious metals, the recovery of many special metals still needs to be improved. An eco-efficient recycling of technology metals from complex products requires high-tech processes, making use of specialisation, economies of scale, and sophisticated metallurgical flowsheets. The actual achievable recycling rates thereby depend on the set-up of the entire recycling chain. Decisive factors are – in addition to the applied technologies – stakeholder cooperation and the management of interfaces.
The biggest challenge however is to secure that end-of-life products are entering into the most appropriate recycling pathways. Today, a large share of old consumer goods is – partly illegal – traded across the globe and escapes recycling or ends up in backyard recycling operations with low recovery rates and dramatic impacts on health and environment. This chapter provides an overview on the recycling of technology metals, and it elaborates the factors impacting success and shows that legislation can be supportive but that consequent enforcement and new business models are essential to close the loop for consumer products.
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Notes
- 1.
The term technology metals is used in this chapter as a synonym for the precious metals (Au, Ag, and the PGMs Pt, Pd, Rh, Ru, Ir) plus the special/specialty metals (among others In, Ga, Ge, rare earth elements, Sb, Se, Si, Te).
- 2.
For example, indium recycling gets increasingly more difficult for target manufacturing → spent ITO target → scrapings from the sputtering chamber → broken or out-of-spec LCD glass → entire out-of-spec or obsolete LCD monitor.
- 3.
One example is PGM loss from car catalysts: In contrast to earlier conditions, today’s autocatalysts under European or American driving conditions emit hardly any PGMs during the use phase. However, under typical ‘developing country’ driving conditions (e.g. bad roads, low car maintenance, misfires, bad petrol quality), a catalyst is likely to be mechanically destroyed, and with broken ceramic catalyst, PGMs are blown out from the exhaust and dissipated along the roadside.
- 4.
Examples are tantalum or rare earth elements used in electronic applications. Present only in very low concentrations (e.g. in circuit boards), they dilute even more into the slag. Due to their dispersion/dilution, the additional energy needed to recover and recycle the metal can exceed the energy requirement for virgin extraction.
- 5.
Solving the E-Waste Problem (www.step-initiative.org)
- 6.
Net value = recovered metals’ value minus smelting and refining charges (not considering costs of collection, preprocessing, and shipment in the preceding recycling chain). Value can vary significantly depending on specific quality/type (especially for autocatalysts).
- 7.
Areas of investigation include all relevant application segments for PGMs: automotive catalysts, chemical and oil refining catalysts, glass manufacturing, dental applications, electronics, jewellery, electroplating, fuel cells, etc.
- 8.
It is estimated that about 50% of used IT electronics leave Europe one way or another. For mobile phones, less than 5% of the theoretical recycling potential is currently being realised globally in a compliant way. For 2006, monitoring results for ELV in Germany showed that out of 3.2 million deregistered passenger cars, only 504,000 were recycled in Germany, while 2.06 million were exported as ‘used cars’. A gap of 640,000 cars addresses mainly unregistered exports. A recycling rate of 86.2% was reported (Umweltbundesamt 2008), but this refers only to the 504,000 cars scrapped in Germany. Calculated on the 3.2 million deregistrations, Germany’s recycling rate would fall to 13.5%. Although 1.8 million of the exported cars go primarily into other (mainly Eastern) EU states, it can be assumed that a big portion will ultimately leave Europe. The export of about 2.5 million cars represents a secondary materials potential of 1.3 million tonnes of steel, 180,000 t aluminium, about 110,000 t of other nonferrous metals, and about 6 t of PGM. Significant quantities of ELVs are also exported from other European countries (Buchert et al. 2007).
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Hagelüken, C. (2013). Recycling of Precious and Special Metals. In: Angrick, M., Burger, A., Lehmann, H. (eds) Factor X. Eco-Efficiency in Industry and Science, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5712-7_15
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