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By 2033, more than one billion laptops, cell phones and other electronic devices could enter the US waste stream each year.
That’s according to a new study in Sustainability of nature which predicts a dramatic increase in the volume and complexity of US electronic waste over the next decade. If not properly recycled, this influx is a growing environmental concern because it contains many toxic materials, said study co-authors Peng Peng and Arman Shehabi, two scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
However, with better end-of-life management, Peng and Shehabi’s work shows that e-waste could also be a source of valuable metals, namely gold, which could benefit the future economy by offsetting the increasing demand for original mining.
From left: Arman Shehabi; Peng Peng (Credit: Berkeley Lab)
In this Q&A, researchers discuss the scale of America’s e-waste problem, as well as the potential for different management solutions across the country.
Peng Peng is a research scientist in the Sustainable Energy Systems Group in the Energy and Environmental Analysis Division (EAEI) at Berkeley Lab.
Arman Shehabi is a researcher in the EAEI Department of Energy Technologies at Berkeley Lab.
P. How big a problem is electronic waste now?
Arman: The amount of discarded electronics is increasing rapidly and in a way it makes sense if you think about it intuitively. We just have more and more electronic devices in our lives. Many of them have a short lifespan.
In our estimation, we have seen that in the US alone, projections show that there is a frame of one billion devices that will be discarded each year in the US by the end of the decade.
– Arman Shehabi, a scientist from Berkeley Lab
One of the big problems is that we don’t really have a system or infrastructure in place to properly take apart these electronics and reuse the various components that are in them, so they’re actually just being landfilled or shipped off to another country to be recycled. Many times that recycling process is not done with proper health regulations and can expose people to some of the toxic materials in those electronics.
Peng: If you look at the increase in the amount of electronics from say 2010 to now, the amount generated in the global environment has doubled. The idea of a circular economy, i.e. finding a way to reuse valuable materials in waste electronics, has been getting a lot of interest lately, but one of the problems from a recycling perspective is that we don’t have very good predictions about what the composition of that waste will be in the future because it’s quite it changes quickly. There is a lag between the type of devices that are produced and the type of devices that go to waste, making it difficult to predict the type of devices that will need to be recycled.
P. How could the results of your study help solve the problem of e-waste?
Peng:
There’s a lot of uncertainty about that, but what we’ve shown is that the amount of gold that’s basically dumped into electronics every year in the US could be equivalent to the amount of gold that’s mined in the country.
– Peng Peng, scientist from Berkeley Lab
We specifically looked at the value of extracting gold from electronics because gold is the most valuable metal you can get from them.
Arman: For our analysis, we pulled together a variety of data sources to look at sales of various electronics here in the US. We specifically focused on consumer electronics simply because, based on the numbers, it represents the largest stream of waste. We correlated projected growth in electronic sales with lifetime estimates for various electronic devices and studies that broke down various electronics to obtain material composition breakdowns in those electronics. And from that we were able to connect different electronic devices with different sized integrated circuits, and then those different sized integrated circuits with a heavy metal or gold circuit composition.
Peng: Another important part of the work was that we showed that if theoretically in the United States all the refineries with intact mining started refining metals from electronics, then they would have the productive capacity to do so. However, one potential problem is that most US gold processing facilities are located primarily in Nevada and Alaska. Theoretically, we found that we could transport all the metals obtained from electronic waste to these refineries in Nevada or Alaska, but shipping them from all over the United States to those places actually creates a huge economic and environmental burden. Our work shows that if we focused on building facilities across the nation to recover the metals from these waste electronics in a number of different locations, we could actually reduce the environmental and economic burden associated with this transportation.
P. Looking ahead, what needs to be done to make your solution possible?
Peng: One of the problems we had while doing this research was that the differences between the different studies that looked at what was in these electronics were quite large. So depending on who did the experiments and what brand, year the electronics were used, etc., there could be dramatic differences between the amount of circuit board, plastic inside the electronics, and gold or other metals in them. To help us narrow down this uncertainty, it would be very helpful if electronics manufacturers included the composition of what is in their electronics without revealing their intellectual property. Recyclers would then be able to understand how much metal is in these electronics.
Arman: If every electronic device had some sort of ingredient label that could tell us what was inside them, it would make it easier to assemble them and move them across the country to the ideal location for their refinement, based on their contents. If manufacturers work a little more closely with refineries end-to-end on this process, it would also be easier to ensure they have the capacity to process the material and optimize their recycling facilities. Another important area where there is scope for future research is with regard to the type of processing that is now being done. Most are based on original mining and researchers should continue to advance new extraction techniques that may be better positioned for electronic recycling.
Q: What do you expect will happen if nothing else is done to address this issue?
Peng: So, I think if nothing is done about this problem, we will definitely face a shortage of critical metal materials from the original resources. And the environmental problem associated with electronic waste is only going to get more complicated because all these different electronic types are much smaller and more dynamic than they were 10 years ago. I think this could potentially be a very serious problem.
Arman: I think that if nothing changes, we will see an increase in the amount of e-waste generated in the United States, and without the corresponding growth in infrastructure, that e-waste will likely be shipped overseas or to other countries and that relies on other countries to take care of our electronic waste. We would also throw away a lot of valuable materials or just give them away. I think that as we move more towards a digital society where we have more and more electronics in our daily lives, the materials used to make electronics will become more and more in demand. So if we can find a better way to extract and store parts of those materials at the end of their life, it will help to enable the economy to grow while minimizing pressure on the environment.
This research was funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
read the nature the pinnacle of research on this paper.
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Founded in 1931 on the belief that teams best solve the greatest scientific challenges, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have won 16 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers are developing sustainable energy and environmental solutions, creating useful new materials, advancing the frontiers of computing, and exploring the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from all over the world rely on laboratory facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multi-program national laboratory operated by the University of California for the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
DOE’s Office of Science is the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and works to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.
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