Addressing the RE resources crunch before it starts
being generated and where. Until now, there have only been broad estimates based on the catch-all of electronic waste, or “e-waste.” The most comprehensive assessment, which still has some acknowledged gaps, comes from the Global EWaste Monitor, a report overseen by the UN Institute for Training and Research (Unitar), the latest version of which was released just last month. It pegs the amount of e-waste generated globally in 2022 at a staggering 62 million metric tons, of which an exceedingly small amount was recycled. The report says that only about 60 percent of the estimated 4 million metric tons of aluminum and 2 million metric tons of copper present in e-waste were recycled, and these are the two easiest metals to recover and reuse. Less than 1 percent of everything else was recycled, including nickel, because most of it exists in an alloy form that cannot be reused.
As just one example of the potentially valuable source of supply e-waste could be, the report estimates that there were 7,248 metric tons of neodymium — used as permanent magnets in everything from smartphones to wind turbines — buried in e-waste in 2022. That is approximately 74 percent of the 9,768 metric tons of neodymium used in the wind power and electric vehicle industries that year, per International Energy Agency statistics.
There are some clean energy metals that have already been recovered and recycled, even though it is technically difficult and expensive to do so, simply because they are so valuable that there is a strong business case for going into trouble to recycle them. Platinum is the active ingredient in catalytic converters; its high price is the reason catalytic converter theft from vehicles has turned into a weird crime wave in the US. Palladium, which is typically the most expensive of the four major precious metals (the others are gold, silver and platinum), is used in the catalysts in hydrogen fuel cells. It is currently trading at about $32.55 per gram (P1,868), so it is definitely considered profitable to try to recover and recycle it.
Thus, it seems that with most things related to climate action, the energy transition, and sustainability in general, the real challenge to answering at least some of the need for clean energy metals through recycling is finding a way to make it commercially attractive. That reality may offend idealist sensibilities, but unfortunately, it’s the way the world works.