Recycling critical raw materials from waste electronic equipment

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Recycling critical raw materials from waste electronic
equipment
(targets set for the end-of-life recycling rates for important critical metals and product
groups).
� Currently the greatest need for improvement for the technical optimization of
recycling is improved manual disassembly during the pre-treatment stage. Various
recent studies show that the generally standard practice in Germany of shredding
whole devices leads to considerable losses of critical metals – in particular precious
metals – which cannot be compensated by the downstream sorting and refining
processes. To improve the recovery of precious metals and cobalt it is essential to
manually remove the components containing important raw materials such as PCBs
and batteries and feed these separately to recycling facilities. In the last few years
various small and medium-sized businesses which manually disassemble the devices
with important raw materials in the collection groups 3 (IT and telecommunication
equipment) and 4 (consumer electronics products) have been able to maintain a
position on the market and therefore enable significantly better recovery rates for
critical raw materials. These companies often work as social enterprises with a large
proportion of employees in the second labour market. The North Rhine-Westphalia
region has the opportunity of targeting support to enterprises of this kind. In addition,
discarded office equipment from public bodies can be disposed of by being given to
such businesses.
� As the study has shown, there are still no appropriate refining processes for many
critical raw materials. This situation can change significantly for some scrap fractions
and metals. It is anticipated that the recovery of rare earths from luminescent
substances will become established on the recycling market over the next few months
or years. There are also numerous research and development projects on the
recovery of rare earths from magnets and of indium from flat screens. It is
recommended to pursue this advance in recycling methods promptly in order to
introduce the necessary optimization into the recycling chains without delay.
� With the anticipated technical advances in recycling, a temporary storage site
needs to be considered for various raw material fractions. This applies in particular to
the luminescent substances containing rare earths. These are already extracted from
gas discharge lamps and cathode ray tubes for the purpose of managing harmful
substances (including mercury, but also cadmium) and stored at a cost in hazardous
waste sites. In order to be able to make use of this raw material potential in the future,
these luminescent substances should be deposited in such a way that they can be
salvaged at a future date without significant cost and fed into recycling processes. A
similar approach needs to be looked into for LCD modules from screens (indium) and
LEDs (indium, gallium, rare earths) and, last but not least, for magnets containing rare
earths (from notebooks and desktops).