Abstract
Rising prices in energy, raw materials, and shortages of critical raw materials (CRMs) for renewable energies or electric vehicles are jeopardizing the transition to a low-carbon economy. Therefore, managing scarce resources must be a priority for governments. To that end, appropriate indicators that can identify the criticality of raw materials and products is key. Thermodynamic rarity (TR) is an exergy-based indicator that measures the scarcity of elements in the earth’s crust and the energy intensity to extract and refine them. This paper uses TR to study 70 Mobile Phone (MP) Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) samples. Results show that an average MP PCB has a TR of 88 MJ per unit, indicating their intensive use of valuable materials. Every year the embedded TR increases by 36,250 GWh worldwide -similar to the electricity consumed by Denmark in 2019- due to annual production of MP. Pd, Ta and Au embedded in MP PCBs worldwide between 2007 and 2021 contribute to 90% of the overall TR, which account for 75, 600 and 250 tones, respectively, and increasing by 11% annually. This, coupled with the short lifespan of MP, makes PCBs an important potential source of secondary resources.
Highlights
The whole world is experiencing soaring energy and raw material costs
This paper examines the raw materials embedded in printed circuit boards (PCBs) in Mobile Phones (MP) as a potential source of secondary resources
The 70 MP Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) samples reviewed are composed of 55 different chemical elements, of which 31 are considered as critical raw materials (CRMs) by the European Commission (EC) (Figure 1)
Summary
The whole world is experiencing soaring energy and raw material costs. Europe is vulnerable to this situation which must import a large part of the raw material domestically consumed by industry and households [1]. -driven by fossil fuel prices [2]- (electricity [3,4,5,6], natural gas [7] and gasoline and diesel [8]), food [9,10] (fertilizers [11]) and livestock feed [12]), shipping [13,14] and even the lack of microchips for factories [15,16], are examples of this These supply issues occur when the transformation to a low-carbon economy driven by renewables, electric vehicles, and digitization is beginning to accelerate. These are not negligible amounts if it is estimated that in the future, the power provided by wind turbines in 2050 could be around 2200 GW [18]
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