“The road to recycling will still be long and costly before it can become profitable, fair and efficient”

PProducing any technological object requires the use of specific materials, in particular metals. However, the scarcity of some of them, the difficulties of importing or even the often disastrous human and environmental conditions in which these metals are mined – sometimes in areas of armed conflict – are very difficult challenges to meet.

Considering the amount of electronic waste that litters our planet today (it is estimated at 53.6 million tonnes and it could double by 2050), one of the first reflexes would be to say: but why aren’t we simply recycling the devices already produced to make new ones – this is called “urban mining” – rather than extracting new ores in mining operations?

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Interest in urban mining is also growing in France, with, for example, the creation of an Urban Mines chair bringing together several engineering schools to support research on the recovery of electrical and electronic waste. But the recovery of existing components is a headache.

The technical difficulties of recycling

On a technical level, it is sometimes very difficult to recover ores in a device. They are, in fact, only present in minute quantities. The work required to recover them, melt them, etc., is then simply not profitable. Moreover, these ores are often mixed with others by fusion, which makes the operation even more complex, if not impossible.

To date, only 17.4% of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is recycled correctly, often due to a lack of infrastructure. About 20% is exported illegally for so-called informal recycling, often in open landfills in countries in Africa, Asia or South America. Ghana and China lead the countries with the largest electronics landfills.

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In these landfills, we often find men and women, but also children, recovering what they can, without any protection and using techniques with catastrophic environmental impacts. Most often these “recyclers” burn everything to recover the metals. The fumes emanating from it are highly toxic, and the residues end up polluting the soil and water. 8% of EEDs end up buried or incinerated in the countries where they are thrown away.

Value of e-waste: $57 billion

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