Hot Topic: Electronic Waste
Electronic waste…doing our not-so-small bit in recycling
A report by Sally Campbell. Featured image shows part of the Great Wall of China.
Humans across the globe generated an estimated 57.4 million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) in 2021 alone, an amount greater than the weight of the Great Wall of China, Earth’s heaviest artificial object. According to a new assessment conducted by the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) Forum, an international expert group tackling the global problem of waste electrical and electronic equipment, the amount of electronic waste has been rapidly growing by two million tonnes every year. The group also estimated that less than 20% is collected and recycled, and highlighting the fact that each tonne of electronic waste that goes un-recycled has a carbon footprint of two tonnes.
“But one thing stands out – as long as citizens don’t return their used, broken gear, sell it, or donate it, we will need to continue mining all-new materials, causing great environmental damage.” Pascal Leroy Director General of WEEE Forum.
The world’s electronic waste has a material value of $62.5 billion, that is £49.16 billion, a number that exceeds the GDP of most countries, according to a 2019 report by the World Economic Forum. E-waste is an all-encompassing term referring to electronic products that are nearing the end of their “useful life” and are discarded. This includes computers, televisions, smartphones, stereos, circuit boards and display screens found in appliances in residential, commercial and industrial applications. Most electronic products contain toxic substances such as beryllium, cadmium, mercury and lead. When they are disposed of in landfills, which they often are, the toxic materials can dissolve and leach in the soil and ground below, eventually polluting groundwater, sources of freshwater and any wildlife habitat in the surrounding area. Global electronic waste saw a 21% surge between 2014 and 2019, and is currently on track to generating up to 74 million tonnes of waste a year by 2030. The already growing problem has been exacerbated by higher consumption rates of electronics, which have been increasing 3% every year, shorter product life spans, as well as limited repair options.
How much electronic materials do you have in your home, your car, your phone, or “waste” (not in use) in your drawers or garage?
According to estimates in Europe, where the problem is best studied, 11 of 72 electronic items in an average household are no longer in use or are broken. For each European citizen, around 4 to 5kg of unused electrical and electronic products are hoarded each year prior to being discarded. (Harry Cockurn The Independent Oct. 2021).
This massive consumption of electronics is leading to demands to commence deep sea mining for rare metal resources used in electronics, especially batteries. We must protect our deep Oceans and their ecosystems from that industrial exploitation. But Battery recyclers are racing to increase capacity and efficiency. As demand grows, recycling needs to recover the resources in each cell. Global demand for batteries is surging. Lithium-ion cells are being incorporated into ever-wider areas of consumer and industrial life, but one of the biggest drivers of battery demand is the accelerating transition to electric vehicles (EVs). EV numbers are predicted to rise by 36% per year globally, passing 245 million vehicles by 2030.
At the present time for most of us, batteries are still used primarily in smaller consumer goods. Consider even the throw away vapes. It is estimated that two plastic vaping pens are tossed out every second in the UK as disposable e-cigarettes surge in popularity. (www.bloomberg 18 March 2023).With the increasing popularity of vaping, there has been a rise in the number of improperly discarded single-use vapes . Since these are not refillable, they are usually ready to be thrown away when the battery is done or the vape juice has finished. Many vapes contain lithium-ion batteries which can be hazardous or harmful to the environment if not disposed of properly. The eLiquid in these batteries can leak into the soil and water, causing pollution. They can also cause harm to plants and animals. Just add up for yourself where in your household do you have batteries: in mobile phones, television handsets, cameras, watches, radios, remote controls, toys, clocks, vacuum cleaners, blood pressure monitors, torches, toothbrushes and even doorbells? Then all those garden and household cordless power tools too. In fact, every person in Britain uses around 10 batteries a year. How many do YOU recycle?
The lithium-ion batteries that power a typical EV (electric vehicle) might contain around 29kg of nickel, 8kg of cobalt and 6kg of lithium. Imagine 43kg of sugar in 1kg bags. Meanwhile, dumping expired batteries can contaminate the environment with toxic compounds, or cause them to degrade, self-ignite and start fires in landfills. An obvious answer is to recycle batteries for their valuable materials, and create a more circular battery economy. Spent EV batteries can be refurbished for use in applications where weight or volume-based performance requirements are less critical, such as stationary storage and backup power. Nonetheless, these batteries will eventually need to be recycled. Fraunhofer ISI has estimated that from 2035, automotive batteries will become the largest share of batteries for recycling.
‘Transition metals like copper, cobalt and nickel are the highest value components within batteries,’ says Emma Kendrick, a battery researcher at the University of Birmingham. ‘But there are other critical materials within batteries such as lithium and graphite.’ While almost all lead-acid batteries are recycled, estimates suggest only a small fraction of lithium-ion batteries get recycled in countries such as the US, certainly less than 10%. Even China, the world’s largest battery producer, is estimated to recycle less than half.
In the UK NMBS (National Merchant Buying Society) and a leading power tool manufacturer have set up a pilot scheme to address the log jam in UK lithium battery recycling.
The near-standstill in lithium battery recycling is causing the UK to sleepwalk into a waste crisis – and needs Government support to fast-track a solution. The call comes from independent merchant buying society NMBS and a leading power tool manufacturer, after setting up a pilot scheme to bring industry together to address the log jam in UK lithium battery recycling. Lack of capacity to process and store waste lithium batteries in the UK and difficulties with exporting the product to overseas, recycling facilities have all but halted current progress.
The pilot was set up in the wake of the rapid rise in use of lithium-iron and lithium-ion batteries across the building industry through products such as power tools. More recycling availability would also help stem the tide of 600 million batteries discarded to landfill in the UK annually – a significant cause of soil and water pollution. NMBS Chief Executive Officer, Chris Hayward, reported ‘This is a pollution problem we have been sleepwalking into for more than a decade, made worse by a failure of legislation to keep up with the rapid increase in lithium battery use. Currently, only 18,000 tonnes of portable batteries are recycled in the UK, while circa-40,000 tonnes were sold in the UK in 2020. To compound this, the only major UK lithium battery recycling facility solely deals with electric vehicle batteries, meaning others must be exported – and these routes are now backlogged’.
So, what is happening in 2023? We all need to speed up recycling of batteries to recover difficult to replace metals and other chemical elements. Until we do the demand by mining companies and users of industrial minerals will grow louder to exploit deep seabed minerals needed to supply that demand for scarce resources. It is up to us to demand the UK develops recycling facilities here and now…more political will and strategic financing must be given to encourage these new industries.
So, what is the process to recycle? Once a battery reaches its end of life, it must be taken to a recycling facility, discharged for safety and dismantled. What remains is then put through an industrial shredder and mechanically sorted to generate ‘black mass’, containing lithium, manganese, cobalt and nickel, among other components depending on the battery. Mechanical treatment involves crushing, vacuum drying, sieving and milling. Material extraction can then begin. Size, density and magnetic separation may be used to take out components like current collectors, casing materials and separators. What happens next varies.
It has been described as a bit like making a Victoria sponge cake, then sticking the entire thing through a shredder and hoping to reclaim the jam and cream. Traditionally, battery recycling is not particularly sophisticated, chemically speaking, Emma Kendrick explains, ‘Often you stick it in the shredder, and then you try and sort it out later. With large plants required for economic viability, it can be difficult for innovative start-ups to get established, although incentives are on the way.’ The EU’s ‘digital passport’ for batteries will vastly increase the requirement for batteries to include recycled materials, while in the US, the Inflation Reduction Act offers financial rewards for domestic battery material production.
How recycling is achieved in case you are wondering and/or interested
Many recyclers, including giants like Umicore in Belgiom, begin with a pyrometallurgical step, which is where battery materials are smelted above 1200°C. Umicore’s process produces metal alloys containing cobalt, nickel, lithium and copper. The company then uses a hydrometallurgical process which involves the use of aqueous chemistry for the recovery of metals from ores, concentrates, and recycled or residual materials, to separate and recover the metals separately, claiming recovered yields of over 95% for cobalt, copper and nickel from a range of battery compositions. These can then be remanufactured into cathode materials for new batteries.
But this is a complex chemical methodology and often requires a lot of energy, which of course we are trying to minimise because of global warming. Hydrometallurgy relies on strong acids in tandem with powerful redox reagents such as hydrogen peroxide. ‘You can also use a hydrometallurgical route to extract the components directly, without going through the pyrometallurgical stage,’ says Emma Kendrick. One issue with placing batteries into a furnace is the energy consumption, but also that lithium is partially lost at high temperatures, rather than captured. On the other hand, more complex hydrometallurgical methods often require a more complex (and expensive) mix of potentially hazardous reagents.
In Finland, Fortum opened a mechanical shredding plant in 2021, and has since built a new pilot-scale hydrometallurgical facility to recycle electric car batteries. Once completed, it will be among the largest in Europe. Also in Scandinavia is Hydrovolt, a joint venture between battery company Northvolt and energy and aluminium provider Hydro. Hydrovolt opened Europe’s largest EV battery recycling plant in Norway, capable of processing 12,000 tons of battery packs each year. It says it will isolate some 95% of battery materials, such as copper, aluminium and black mass, the latter being a powder containing the valuable metals.
BASF is building a commercial-scale black mass production plant in Schwarzheide, Germany, with an annual processing capacity of 15,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries from electric cars. It is scheduled to begin operations in 2025. The company is also building a prototype recycling plant in Schwarzheide to test and refine its hydrometallurgical technology for recovering lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese from black mass. ‘Our refining process is based on known technologies from the mining industry as they are also used by other recycling companies,’ according to a BASF spokesperson. To recover lithium, BASF will lean on a process from Tenova Advanced Technologies, with proprietary solvent extraction and lithium electrolysis.
Solvay is also developing new ways to recover lithium, collaborating with hazardous waste recycler Veolia. Today, hydrometallurgical extraction normally first removes cobalt, then nickel and finally lithium, by which time much of the lithium has been lost. ‘We have a [laboratory scale] process that can bring a step-change to extracting lithium,’ reports Christophe Couesnon, head of battery sustainability at Solvay in France. Where lithium is currently extracted at all, it is mostly as lithium carbonate, he notes. Battery makers must then use more water, energy and reagents to obtain lithium hydroxide for batteries. ‘Our process can go directly from the lithium content inside the battery to lithium hydroxide,’ says Couesnon. Today, this battery ingredient is not in demand in Europe, since there is so little battery manufacturing, ‘but in a couple of years there’s going to be huge demand’, says Couesnon.
Demand is rising and more opportunities too, so the potential is coming
So, as of now, demand is creating opportunities, reports Laura Lander, a battery engineer at King’s College London. ‘There’s a trend for a lot of recycling start-ups in Europe, as recycled material becomes more valuable.’ One example is Cylib, founded in 2022 on the back of processes developed at RWTH at Aachen University, Germany. ‘Our process extracts plastics, copper and aluminium early, then we perform water-based lithium and graphite extractions,’ says Gideon Schwich, a cofounder of Cylib. ‘This lowers the mass significantly, so we need less effort and less chemicals to extract further elements.’ For now, the start-up recycles one EV battery per day, equivalent to 500–800kg, but it expects to start a production line capable of recycling thousands of tonnes per day in early 2026, likely in Germany. Graphite production, says Lander, is quite polluting, so recovering graphite will have a positive environmental impact and will likely be incentivised by European regulators.
Cleaner streams will be the future for recycling
With more material becoming available to recycle, new processes are being explored, such as direct recycling: instead of destroying and then recovering metals, this seeks to extract materials that could be repaired or reused in new batteries. ‘A lot of research is going into ways to directly take a battery apart and separate out the cathode and the anode and recover the materials as they are, without mixing them all together,’ says Jaqueline Edge, a mechanical engineer at Imperial College London.
It would be wrong to suggest that Europe or North America are leading the way in battery recycling. In terms of volume, China is unsurpassed, providing more than half of global battery recycling capacity of around 200,000 tonnes per year. The battery maker CATL, for example, is about to build a 24 billion yuan (£2.8 billion) recycling facility to recover battery waste. GEM, a Chinese recycling firm, aims to process 200,000 tonnes a year by 2025, a 20-fold rise in volume from 2021.
Other countries such as South Korea and India are also keen to establish robust local supply chains, in part to reduce their dependence on China in securing key materials (see Lander 2023).
But there is room to step up a gear in recycling processes. One issue is that batteries are simply not designed for recycling, with variations in pack designs and cathode composition, while glues and binders make automated disassembly more difficult. ‘Only very recently is thinking going into the design of batteries for disassembly and recycling,’ says Lander. ‘There’s a need for redesign, to start thinking about what happens to these batteries at the end of life and how we can more easily disassemble them and reclaim pure material waste streams,’ says Kendrick. ‘Because right now, we put all this effort into creating highly engineered cells and then stick them in a shredder.’
So recycling is not easy…yet… advances are happening rapidly and we all need to be mindful that it is our responsibility for the push for recycling. As Greta Thunberg wrote ‘The most effective way to get out of this mess is to educate ourselves’ and later ‘We now have to do the seemingly impossible’.
So be aware of the effects of all this e-technology.
FORESIGHT from UN 50 Science Division 1972-2022 Published by the United Nations Environmental Programme to highlight a hotspot of environmental change, feature an emerging science topic or discuss a contemporary environmental issue:
The Growing Footprint of digitalisation
Since 2010, the number of internet users worldwide has doubled, and the global internet traffic has grown 12-fold. The digital services that we enjoy are sometimes referred to as “dematerialized technologies”, but is this really the case? Computers, servers and other electronic devices require large amounts of natural resources. The energy to run them emits high amounts of CO2, and programmed obsolescence and the low percentage of recycling are generating e-waste. The vast majority of data in the cloud is not used. Without denying the many benefits brought by these technologies, including for the environment, it is important for users, services providers and policy makers to understand what the impacts are and to learn how we can move towards greener digital technologies. The “life in the cloud” – with our music, photos, movies, emails, documents, the social networks stored on distant servers, accessible instantaneously from PC, laptop or mobile phone, from almost any corner of the earth – has become the new norm.
In addition, most of our economic transactions have become digitalized. It was estimated that 60% of global GDP would be digital by the end of 2022 and that 70% of new value created in the economy over the next decade will be based on digitally enabled platforms (World Economic Forum 2019).
Although half of the world’s population remains disconnected (UN Secretary General 2020) there are now 4.2 billion social media users. 5.2 billion people use a mobile phone today, making mobile phones the most widely used internet device in all countries (Kemp 2021). Since 2010, the number of internet users worldwide has doubled and the global internet traffic has grown 12-fold (International Energy Agency [IEA] 2020). More than half of the world’s population (4.7 billion people) used the Internet in 2020 – with more than one million people coming online for the first time each day. I’m exhausted, I don’t know about you!
The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the onward march of digital transformation. Much of our resilience to COVID-19 was based on digital technologies, including the development of vaccines, risk modelling and contact tracing. Many employers and educational institutions also migrated to an on-line format, with web conferencing becoming standard in most developed countries for work and school, as well as for keeping in contact with family and friends. A trend towards home-working is only possible through this transformation.
The digital advances made are staggering when we look at the short time scales of their technical implementation. But they also come at a cost, as the production of the hardware and the electricity needed to fuel this Internet explosion both leave a large environmental footprint. The digital economy brings opportunities to lower our environmental impacts, e.g. replacing flying to conferences by videoconferencing, and many other benefits (see UNEP 2019a; UNEP 2020). This foresight brief therefore asks and answers the question: how can we begin to green our digital future?
Demand for digital services drives production and supply of digital devices causing an increase in energy demands. Electricity supply through fossil fuels that are polluting and increase greenhouse gases will worsen climate change and in turn adversely impact human health. Digital devices, if built and operated using renewable energy resources and with recyclable components such as batteries, will help improve human health through reducing pollution and climate change. This approach in turn leads to a more sustainable reinforcement of demand for digital services.
Just to give you an idea of energy use for digital services
Increase in Energy Demand
If the Internet was a country, that country would be the sixth biggest electricity consumer on the planet, using up to 7% of the global electricity consumption (Andrae 2020; Eon 2021) and is responsible for up to 3.8% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Bordage 2019) – that is more than international air traffic with a share of 2.5% of GHG emissions (Lee et al. 2021).
Increase of e-waste. In 2019, a record 53.6 million metric tonnes of e-waste were produced, the equivalent weight of 125,000 Boeing 747 jumbo jets – which is more than all of the commercial aircraft ever created. This makes e-waste the world’s fastest-growing domestic waste stream, fuelled mainly by higher consumption rates of electric and electronic equipment, short life cycles, and few options for repair. Only 17.4 per cent of e-waste was officially documented as formally collected and recycled. Only 78 countries have e-waste legislation (Forti et al., 2020).
What can I do? Asked Jane Fonda. “Activism is not a sprint or a marathon, it is a relay race. The most important thing we adults can do now is to join and support the next generation of climate activists to lead the movement” Jane Fonda wrote. If you managed to read to this end, you will know there is much to do. To me that also means giving everyone the information and data to be able to feel confident to challenge the status quo.
References:
Fonda, Jane (2020) What Can I Do? Penguin Press
King, Anthony (2023) Battery recyclers race to increase capacity and efficiency. In Lithium and Beyond. The Energy Storage Special. In Chemistry World May 2023. www.chemistryworld.com pp38-39
Lai, Olivia (2021) Global E-Waste Will Weigh More Than the Great Wall of China.
Lok, Tin (2023) What is E-Waste Recycling and How Is it Done?
Lander, Kit (2023) The Lithium Rush. In Lithium and Beyond. The Energy Storage Special. In Chemistry World May 2023 pp. 32-37
NBMS (2022) UK sleepwalking into crisis of lithium battery recycling impasse. www.nmbs.co.uk
Schwarzer, Stefan, Peduzzi, Pascal, UNEP/GRID-Geneva (2021)
UN Environmental programme (2021) The Growing Footprint of Digitalisation Foresight Brief No 027. www.wedocs.unep.org
Sally Campbell, June 2023
