The demand for special metals used in the manufacture of electronics is booming, but a few countries control much of the world’s supply. Germany is looking to reduce its reliance on imports by exploiting the metal that is thrown away in trash. Urban mining could become big business.
Thierry Van Kerckhoven has an eye for hidden value. The Belgian can look at a pile of shredded scrap metal from electronic devices and recognize what it is made of. Not only that, he can tell how much it’s worth.
Kerckhoven works as a buyer of such waste in the world’s largest recycling facility for complex precious metals in Hoboken, a section of the Belgian city of Antwerp. The Umicore Group owns the facility, where deliveries are stored in individual concrete bays. Kerckhoven removes his sunglasses and surveys his treasures.
The powdery and shiny material in Box 2051 on the far left, Kerckhoven explains, used to be printed circuit boards and monitors. The copper in the mixture produces the brown color and the glass makes it shimmer. Kerckhoven can detect the remnants of SIM cards in a pile of colorful bits of plastic in the next bay. He pulls out a handful and points to the word “Vivo,” a Brazilian mobile communications company.
“Probably excess production,” he says, explaining that this is why the material ended up in the landfill. Useless for Vivo, it becomes a valuable resource for Umicore. There are about 100 grams of gold, valued at about Ђ3,400 ($5,000), in each ton of waste in this box. By comparison, a ton of ore from a gold mine often contains no more than 5 grams of the precious metal. When it comes to yield, the recycling plant in Hoboken far outperforms any mine in the world.
But the 16 other metals that Umicore extracts at this facility are at least as sought after as gold. They include gallium, a key ingredient in solar cells, and rhodium, which is used in catalytic converters, and of which Umicore produces four tons a year, or one-fifth of the global demand.
Dangerous Bottlenecks
Such raw materials are scarce and coveted, and have become more and more expensive over the years. The industry, warning of dangerous bottlenecks, is searching for new sources. One solution could come from the garbage can. What was simply waste in the past is suddenly being upgraded to a valuable resource.
If electronic waste were systematically recycled, companies could at least partially cover their demand for important metals on their own in the future. Then manufacturing countries would no longer be as dependent on producing countries like Australia, Brazil and China, the key suppliers of the metals known as rare earths. These sought-after special metals, with names like dysprosium and neodymium, are essential in the manufacture of high-tech products.
Until now, however, the potential for the extraction of rare earths from recycled materials was largely unexploited. While Germany achieves recycling rates upwards of 80 percent for glass and paper, the majority of electronic devices are lost as sources of raw materials. Electric shavers, hair dryers and toasters gather dust in cabinets and drawers or, as is more often the case, are simply thrown in the general trash and end up in waste incinerators.
There, veritable treasures literally go up in smoke. For example, for every ton of mobile phones, or about 10,000 units, that are disposed of in an incinerator, 150 kilograms of copper, 5 kilograms of silver and about 100 grams of palladium are lost.
Source: SPIEGELONLINE
By Alexander Jung