Metals are present everywhere around us and are one of the major materials upon which our economies are built. Economic development is deeply coupled with the use of metals. During the 20th century, the variety of metal applications in society grew rapidly. In addition to mass applications such as steel in buildings and aluminium in planes, more and more different metals are in use for innovative technologies such as the use of the speciality metal indium in LCD screens. A lot of metals will be needed in the future. It will not be easy to provide them. In particular in emerging economies, but also in industrialised countries, the demand for metals is increasing rapidly. Mining and production activities expand, and with that also the environmental consequences of metal production. In this course, we will explore those consequences and we will also explore options to move towards a more sustainable system of metals production and use. We will focus especially on the options to reach a circular economy for metals: keeping metals in use for a very long time, to avoid having to mine new ones. This course is based on the reports of the Global Metals Flows Group of the International Resource Panel that is part of UN Environment. An important aspect that will come back each week, are the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs. Those are ambitious goals to measure our progress towards a more sustainable world. We will use the SDGs as a touching stone for the assessment of the metals challenge, as well as the solutions we present in this course to solve that challenge.
Product-centric Recycling to Increase Recycling Rates by Markus Reuter (Part 2)
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From the course by Universiteit Leiden
A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism
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Universiteit Leiden
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From the lesson
Solutions to the Metals Challenge
Week 4 is rather packed with lectures on the different options to solve the metals challenge. You will meet experts from all over the world, who will lecture on materials and product design-for-environment and design-for-recycling, on the possibilities and also the barriers for remanufacturing, and on recycling as the last, but maybe most important resort to keep the metals in use. All these options aim at keeping up the stock-in-use of metals in society, while at the same time reducing the need to mine new metals. They all have their own strengths and limitations and can be regarded as pieces of the large puzzle aiming at solving the metals challenge, or in other words, reconciling the different SDGs.
Meet the Instructors
Ester van der VoetDr.
Institute of Environmental Sciences
It's an interesting balance between mining the mine that is the geological mine,
and mining the urban mine,
but there's a very interesting parallel between the two.
Both are mining minerals.
The one designed by nature,
the other one designed by a designer of a product.
The interplay of these two,
the balance between these two,
the extraction of minor elements from geological minerals.
The mining of elements and alloys and materials from
complex consumer products is very much this similar type of activity.
Therefore, if you want to get the balance right,
you have to understand the interaction systemically
between the classical processing route and the recycling processing route,
and they link together in extractive metallurgy.
Ultimately, mining the mine,
whichever one of these,
the urban or the geological mine, ultimately,
it's about producing metals, high quality alloys,
high quality materials that go into products that are truly changing our society.
For the base metals, specifically copper and lead implies that there is a complete,
metallurgical infrastructure that can create refined metal.
On the other hand, the steel segment shows that
if metals flow into it and they don't comply to the alloy specifications,
then that element is in fact lost and it's not
recycled because it's imparting no functionality to that alloy.
If you look at copper, I've made very clear to
you that copper is a refining infrastructure
that releases also elements and makes them available
for high purity recovery by various means.
Hydro mythology and whatever other methods that are available.
The iron side is an infrastructure,
for instance, that is creating alloys.
So very important for the steel industry is to make sure
that wrong elements don't get into their system.
So they have to have very,
very tight control of what they call tramp elements going into
that system because they contaminate the steel and have effects,
so they have to be diluted to levels where it is acceptable.
Consider this drawing and let's do a case.
By considering the complex mineral car,
it's become a highly sophisticated mixture of innovative alloys, materials,
electronics, glued,
bolted, welded together in innovative ways.
Ultimately, when these products specifically of course recycled,
various random events could happen.
Life is never 100 percent cut out.
It's got various variations that could happen. Let's take the following.
A piece of steel is shredded out of that car,
and it by chance envelops the circuit board,
a small circuit board that which are very many in the high-end cars this day.
Let's look at two segments of this drawing and what happens to that.
By chance, the magnet directs
the steel with this printed circuit board to the steel industry.
Obviously, the steel will be recycled but
the possible gold contained within
that printed circuit board will also dissolve in the steel,
but it's potentially lost because ultimately,
the steel industry is trying to create alloys,
a very close specification, and that's the product.
So the feed to a steel plant has to be controlled very
tightly to ensure that these constraints are met.
In this case, we lose the gold.
Let's look at taking that same piece of scrap and it by chance,
gets to the copper recycling chain.
Copper has also the propensity to dissolve gold,
but the beauty of copper is that it is also fairly noble.
Therefore, when you do true refining, you can,
from this mixture of copper and all the dissolved elements,
create pure copper and refined elements at high purity of everything that is of value,
and that is dissolved in there.
Obviously, some elements have no value and they are also lost in
certain phases because of economic reasons or just application reasons.
But in this case, we win the gold, the valuable bit,
but we would lose the iron which would then go to the slag or if we would dissolve it,
it would go into a solution.
But ultimately, that iron is lost from the cycle because most likely,
you will not produce new iron from the slag or from a precipitate, from a solution.
So in summary, each particle that is created in recycling,
each complex mineral has to be understood in
the full complexity of
the available metallurgical infrastructure
to understand where it's ultimately going to land.
If it goes the wrong way, it's lost.
If it goes the right way, you win it.
But you will always win some and you always lose some,
and that's an economic game as well,
and it's also dictated ultimately if there is a use or not for these elements.
So in summary, this drawing is just trying to show that complexity in a visual way,
that one has to take considerable care to look at
this resource efficient recycling in
that depths to ensure that we are maximizing the recovery of those elements we want.
Those we can't get,
at least put them into places where they do not harm nature.
And that's also extremely important activity of this whole resource efficiency.
And it is very clear that if you just look at the consumer products,
that's very, very similar.
It's the same type of construct.
The only difference between a consumer product and
a mineral is that the designer put the elements together,
and they are sometimes totally incompatible,
and that makes recycling so extremely complex.
Whereas if you look at this drawing, of this figure,
the base metal industry has over many years honed its production
in recovery to the highest level to
maximize the recovery of everything it can that has got value,
creating at the same time the minimum of residue, minimum of waste.
So the industry has over many years been resource efficient as it can.
The trick of recycling is now to do that but in a very much larger scale.
To understand what the minor elements are doing in the system,
there is a one-on-one extension of
this drawing which highlights that from the geological minerals.
In our report, we focused specifically on
a concept product centric recycling which considers
the complexity and interactions of all elements,
compounds, alloys and materials in a product and the effect they have on recycling.
The intensity of use of metals is increasing.
The types of metals used in sustainability enabling products is increasing.
Therefore, so the constraints on the use of these,
the supply of these is becoming an issue.
Now there are various ways to follow this path.
Either the sky is the limit or innovation takes place which will substitute metals,
materials, come up with new innovative designs.
What does the future hold for us is most important and to look at
that whole system to understand where that path is going to lead us.
That is one of the key messages in that report.
How to do that, how to understand that.
Considering this specific slide which is also very close to
my own professional career as I was
closely involved in also optimizing the specific plant in Japan,
which produces various recycled metals,
refined metals from a variety of inputs.
The total feed is around 150,000 tons per annum but from this figure,
it is clear that you have a balance between
smelting and hydro metallurgical refining technology.
The real importance of recycling is not just to dilute the problem,
create alloys to specification.
It's also to produce very refined metals which can go
back into those highly sophisticated products that we use daily.
The specific figure shows this balance that on the back of copper,
lead and zinc mythology,
refining can take place.
So recycling is not just a black box with things flow in and metals come out.
Specifically, end of life products flow in and
highly refined elements flow out as
shown in the specific drawing where from e-waste for instance,
platinum group metals, precious metals,
Selenium, Tellurium, but also Mercury, Zinc,
Lead, other elements flow out,
but as refined metals not as alloys, as refined metal.
So the importance of closing the loop is not only
allowing infrastructure like the steel and mainly aluminum industry,
but you also need a base metal industry that produces highly refined metals in
an highly sophisticated high-tech refining infrastructure as shown on the specific slide.
Considering the figure in the slide,
you will see this balance elaborated on.
On the one hand, the link between primary production seek and on the other hand,
the secondary production from recyclates.
But ultimately, at the bottom of that figure,
you will see the foundation of resource efficiency.
The foundation of the, for instance,
EU 2020 ideas are all based ultimately about and
on the availability of an infrastructure that actually
produces the metals so that they can go back into the products.
If that happens, we are truly closing the loop.
Furthermore, you'll see in this figure two aspects.
The one is obviously the footprint everybody speaks about but there's also the handprint,
the doing bit, actually making it work.
If you consider this whole picture,
it does not just function on paper.
It obviously functions in economic and a technical environment.
If these two work,
we will be able to close the loop in inverted commas.
Closing the loop never possible because we are limited by physics.
However, we try to do that as far as we can and that is
the handprint that we are trying to show in our report. What can be done?
What cannot be done?
When must we innovate a way,
and must we innovate?
How must we change the direction of what we are doing?
But as I said, ultimately,
recycling is about metal recovery,
and producing high grade metals that can flow
back into the products as also shown in this specific figure,
that you are producing metals that go into product,
and they come back at the end of life back into that metallurgical industry.
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