Recycling critical raw materials from waste electronic equipment

Recycling critical raw materials
from waste electronic equipment
1 Background and objectives
Against the backdrop of the importance of certain metals and other raw materials for many
future technologies and the concurrent scarcity of these resources, the European
Commission has classified a selection of fourteen raw materials as being particularly
significant and critical (EC 2010). In view of the potential or expected difficulties attached to
the supply of these critical raw materials, recovery of the raw materials from waste products
is all the more important. This is the starting point for the project "Recycling critical raw
materials from waste electronic equipment". The project's aims are to produce a life cycle
inventory of the occurrence of the critical raw materials in four selected groups of electronic
devices – flat screens, LED lights, notebooks and smartphones – and to develop recycling
options for the waste equipment to recover the critical raw materials. Studies by the Oeko-
Institut have shown that, for the four product groups being investigated, the following metals
or groups of metals from the 14 "critical" raw materials identified by the EC study are of
particular importance:
� Cobalt,
� Gallium,
� Germanium,
� Indium,
� Platinum group metals, 1
� Rare earths, 2
� Tantalum.
The following figure presents an overview of the current end-of-life recycling rates for 60
metals (Graedel et al. 2011). These ranges of values represent the global situation, however,
and include all uses of the metals.
1
The platinum group metals comprise the elements platinum, palladium, iridium, rhodium, ruthenium and
osmium.
2
The rare earths (often also called rare earth metals) include the elements yttrium, scandium and what are
known as the lanthanides (lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, neodymium, promethium, samarium, europium,
gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, holmium, erbium, thulium, ytterbium and lutetium).
1