Recycling of Precious and Special Metals

Abstract

The use of special and precious metals has accelerated significantly over the past 30 years, and their sufficient future availability is crucial for clean technologies and other high-tech equipment. Recycling contributes to secure access to these metals, conserve metal resources, mitigate potential temporary scarcities, and reduce the climate impact of metal production. While today efficient metallurgical processes exist to recover base and precious metals, the recovery of many special metals still needs to be improved. An eco-efficient recycling of technology metals from complex products requires high-tech processes, making use of specialisation, economies of scale, and sophisticated metallurgical flowsheets. The actual achievable recycling rates thereby depend on the set-up of the entire recycling chain. Decisive factors are – in addition to the applied technologies – stakeholder cooperation and the management of interfaces.The biggest challenge however is to secure that end-of-life products are entering into the most appropriate recycling pathways. Today, a large share of old consumer goods is – partly illegal – traded across the globe and escapes recycling or ends up in backyard recycling operations with low recovery rates and dramatic impacts on health and environment. This chapter provides an overview on the recycling of technology metals, and it elaborates the factors impacting success and shows that legislation can be supportive but that consequent enforcement and new business models are essential to close the loop for consumer products.KeywordsCircuit BoardPrecious MetalCatalytic ConverterSpecial MetalRecycling RateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.