This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Throwing something away that is urgently needed, expensive and difficult to source sounds crazy. Yet of the 60 metals contained in old electronic devices such as phones, screens and washing machines, only a few are recycled.
That includes precious metals such as gold and silver and other metals such as aluminum and copper. The rest are effectively single-use metals, used once and then lost during collection or through incineration. Metals are mined from ore and refined using a lot of energy and resources as part of complex global supply chains.
Think of the diesel needed to power the huge trucks in the mine, the chemicals needed to extract metals from ores or the pollution from intense furnaces. By throwing away metal-rich electronics and not recovering these precious resources, we lose all the effort put into getting the metals out of the ground. Yet these metals are urgently needed for green technologies such as wind turbines and heat pumps, as well as for conventional industries including car manufacturing, aerospace and machinery production.
At the same time, most are not physically accessible for mining within Europe. In research published with my colleagues, we investigated the different stages at which metals are lost when items such as LED lights and air conditioners are thrown away. We identified that a large quantity of electronic waste (56%) in the EU between 2006–21 was not collected.
Metals, however, can only be recovered if they end up in the right treatment facilities. Old devices often get thrown into household waste bins, where electronics become too mixed with other rubbish for the metals to be separated. While the quantity of collected waste has substantially risen in recent years in some EU member states, others still lag behind.
Proper e-waste collection thus remains a top priority across the continent. A large chunk of metals is also lost during the sorting and recycling stages, mostly due to inefficient sorting. For many metals, there are no available recycling technologies.
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