Where Valuable Materials End Up

Your smartphone does so much. It connects you to friends and family. It helps you navigate an unfamiliar city. You pay bills, shop, watch videos, play games, and check bank balances all from your phone. While it’s incredibly useful, it impacts the environment in many ways before it even gets into your hands.

A smartphone is made up of many materials. The outer casing is usually plastic (crude oil) or metal. The LCD is glass, liquid crystalline, or plastic. Rechargeable batteries contain copper and lithium metal oxide. The circuit board inside your phone has copper, gold, lead, palladium, and silver.

Consider this: for every 1 million cellphones that are recycled, specialists recover. 

• 33 pounds of palladium
• 75 pounds of gold
• 772 pounds of silver
• 35,274 pounds of copper

Not to mention all of the glass, plastic, and rare earth minerals that are also found in electronics.

Urban mining is key to collecting those materials for reuse. Instead of mining deeper into the earth and polluting water and soil, materials that would otherwise go to waste get a new life. It protects the earth, its people, and its animals.

To understand the importance and potential of urban mining, it helps to look at where those materials usually end up after an electronic device or construction materials are no longer needed. While electronics recycling is gaining ground, we still have a long way to go before it’s perfect.

Materials Lost to Landfills

A sad truth is that only 50% of U.S. states have laws that mandate electronic recycling. Even in states with rules in place, electronics still get thrown away.

For decades, people didn’t think about the potential risk as they threw out items containing lead, mercury, and other heavy metals. Five parks in Durham, North Carolina, were closed due to high lead levels. Those parks were built over or near a 1930s landfill incinerator. Decades later, the damage to the area became clear.

Electronics and Appliances

Paper and cardboard are the items that most people recycle. When it comes to electronics, the EPA estimates that only 38.5% was recycled in 2018. Every appliance, battery, computer, laptop, or cellphone that ends up in a landfill is wasted material.

Recovering the rare earth minerals and metals from electronics is possible. It reduces the need to mine new materials and keeps electronics breaking down slowly over decades, potentially poisoning future generations.

Construction and Demolition Debris

Construction and demolition debris is also a concern. In 2018, 600,330 tons of C&D materials were generated. Of that, 143,780 tons went to a landfill, 131,590 tons were reused in manufacturing, and 313,070 tons were turned into aggregate. It’s a good start, but there’s still room for improvement.

Materials that went to a landfill don’t decompose. Think about the pottery they find in archaeological digs. It may break into pieces over time, but it doesn’t decompose. It’s designed to resist decomposing. While it breaks into smaller pieces, leachate can leach into groundwater and soil. 

Landfills have liners, but it’s hard to tell exactly how long a liner will last. The newer liners have only been used since the 1980s, so they’re not even 50 years old yet. In 100 years, who knows if they’ll still capture leachates and keep them from reaching the water that goes to people’s homes.

Materials Lost to Incineration

Some areas rely on waste-to-energy. Large magnets may be used to pull metal from the trash heading to incinerators, but it only gets ferrous metals. Other metals and rare earth minerals are incinerated and end up in the flue gas or slag. There’s no way to recover them.

Not only do you lose the value of those materials, but you also increase contamination through air pollution if a filtration system fails or isn’t as effective as it used to be. Plus, the slag has to go somewhere. If it goes to a specialized landfill, the long-term effects of those toxins keep piling up.

Materials Lost to Poor Recycling Programs and Export Markets

Many electronics never enter a formal recycling program. Instead, scrap electronics, used vehicles, scrap metal, and appliances are shipped to developing countries where workers and facilities can’t process items without putting the environment and themselves at risk.

Sometimes, these informal recycling centers have no more than boxes to sit on while breaking down items by hand. Valuable materials are saved, and the rest go into large open pits for burning. Crude chemical acid baths may be used to dissolve circuit boards. Cable insulation may be burned off as it’s faster.

These methods can recover valuable metals like copper and gold, but other items are lost. Cobalt and lithium are two materials that aren’t recovered in these less-advanced processes. Workers also risk burns, and both workers and nearby residents breathe in harmful smoke.

Materials like lead enter the air and settle in soil, where they can be absorbed by the fruits and vegetables that grow in that soil. The impact of this informal processing continues for years.

Materials Lost to Downcycling

Not all recycled material maintains its original quality. Many materials collected through standard recycling programs undergo downcycling, where materials are recovered in a less valuable form. This chart breaks it down.

Materials Lost to Stockpiling

The largest quantity of urban mining materials isn’t in a landfill or recycling facility. It’s sitting in closets, basements, garages, attics, storerooms, or storage lockers. It could be in a kitchen drawer or filing cabinet. In a circular economy, these materials are known as hibernating stock.

• Consumer Electronics: Old cables, chargers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets that are sitting untouched somewhere in a home or office building. A Canadian study found that about 9% of the 181+ million devices in Canadian homes were not being used.
• Industrial and Electrical Infrastructure: Decommissioned power transformers, retired manufacturing equipment, old telecommunications copper lines, and unused piping often stay in place because removing them takes time and money.

These stockpiles are rich in copper, gold, lithium, palladium, and silver. To get people to turn them in, two things need to happen.

1. Collections need to be convenient. If a person has to drive 30 miles to reach an electronics recycling event, odds are they won’t try to fit it into an already busy schedule. Drop-off boxes in convenient locations and available outside normal working hours make a difference.
2. Incentives go a long way. It’s already helping with new cellphone purchases. Someone wants the latest smartphone and gets a cash discount if they trade in their old device.

The Urban Mining Solution

Once items are collected, advanced urban mining processes are essential. Closed-loop hydrometallurgy and pyrometallurgy capture items before they’re sent to landfills or developing countries and are processed carefully to recover high-purity critical rare earth elements and metals. 

From there, they re-enter manufacturing supply chains. Ideally, this is where you come back into the picture. Purchase new electronics made from recycled materials.

What Can You Do to Support Urban Mining?

Take time to research how to recycle your home electronics and appliances. Takeback programs often simplify the process, as you can ship the item back to the manufacturer. If that isn’t possible, ask your local municipal recycling facility for guidance on where to go with the items you have.

Businesses also need to do their part. Don’t let old office electronics sit in a storeroom for years. Recycle them with an electronics recycler as soon as possible. If the item still has years of use, refurbishing it helps the device last as long as possible. If not, it can be destroyed, broken down into recyclable materials, and used again.

Urban mining takes your old tech and turns it into the tech others buy as they upgrade. It’s an essential part of a circular economy.