Mitigating issues of future wastes
Enhancing resource productivity in emerging technologies
On 5 September 2018, our Environment Sustainability and Energy Division held an international meeting at Burlington House, London looking at how the chemical sciences can bring solutions to the scientific and policy challenges relating to the emerging issues of mounting waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE).
Matthew Lloyd Davies & Rhys Charles (Swansea University) and Chris Ennis (Teesside University) from ESED Council put together a comprehensive and diverse science-policy programme for the day, which highlighted the enormous potential value that is currently trapped in our electronic wastes and how the chemical sciences can bring solutions to extracting the value of critical raw materials (CRMs) back into a circular economy approach to innovation.
Our phones, gadgets and computers contain many CRMs and at their end of use, we need to find technical solutions to retrieve these materials back as useful resources. Mark Dowling from Giraffe Innovation showed us the ‘WEEE man’ which is an artistic representation of the amount of electrical waste that one person will produce in their lifetime, assuming we carry on discarding items at the current rate. Mark said, “we estimate this to be around 3 tonnes for the UK and similar in Europe”.
Margaret Bates (University of Northampton) and Matthew Lloyd Davies shared highlights of their international research work with countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, India and Brazil. This event was formally recognised by the Brazilian Embassy as part of the UK-Brazil Year of Science 2018-2019. The day before the event Margaret Bates and Brazilian delegates visited recycling facilities in the UK and discussed policy approaches to electronic waste with UK government representatives. Margaret shared in her talk that the GSMA 2015 report estimated that Brazil was discarding 1.4 million tonnes of electronic equipment per year, and new policies and technologies are being developed.
Norah Lewis from the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) explained that “in the UK we send to landfill over half a million tonnes of electronic waste every year and over a tonne of that is gold (Au)”. One of many EU-funded projects in this area, the ‘Critical Raw Materials Recovery Project’ led by WRAP in the UK, is looking at new policies and take-back plans for electronic wastes working with major charities and retailers.
The day was full of exciting science that is aiming to provide solutions for processing electronic wastes to recover CRMs and also in generating energy from waste, including a presentation on catalysis engineering for sustainable technologies from the 2017 Sustainable Energy Award winner, Professor Javier Perez Ramirez (ETH Zurich).
Technical solutions from the chemicals sciences, sound policies and a change in behaviour from consumers, all need to evolve and come together via effective collaborations, to ensure that we retain the value of our critical raw materials from emerging electronic wastes. It was broadly recognised that one policy ambition to increase the rate of recycling, would be to achieve a technological solution for irreversibly wiping data from old devices, to assure consumers that their data would not be stolen when handing machines over for reuse and recycling. This is currently a risk unless hard drives are physically disintegrated to retrieve CRMs.
