E-waste is the fastest growing solid waste stream on the planet. The world threw away a record 62 million metric tons of electronics in 2022, representing a staggering 82% increase since 2010. That’s enough waste to “fill 1.55 million 40-tonne trucks, roughly enough trucks to form a bumper-to-bumper line encircling the equator,” according to the UN. And within those 62 million tons were billions of kilograms of critical and costly metals and minerals. It’s estimated that there were 130 thousand kilograms of lithium in the batteries of e-cigarettes and vapes alone.
These staggering figures come to us courtesy of the United Nations 2024 Global E-Waste Monitor, which tracked the waste of valuable metals for the first time ever this year in response to the ballooning scale of our global e-waste problem. The report projects that the problem will continue to grow by leaps and bounds, increasing another 32% to reach 82 million tonnes in 2030.
Closing the loop on e-waste and improving recycling methods will be critical to the global clean energy transition. “The scale of this waste, and its mismatch with current demand trends for the same materials, is staggering,” Oilprice reported last year. In the same year that we threw away 2 million metric tons of copper in the form of e-waste 2022, demand for copper from climate tech alone reached 6 million metric tons, according to figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Improving recycling methods will reduce the need to extract new materials, which are associated with significant negative externalities for public health and the environment, and will also help to shape more balanced clean energy supply chains. Currently, China has a choke-hold on a huge number of the raw materials required for clean energy manufacturing, and recycling e-waste will add much-needed diversity to these markets. China alone refines 60% of the world’s lithium, and as trade tensions ramp up between Washington and Beijing under the Trump administration, developing alternative supply streams in the West is more critical than ever before.
Ironically enough, a new scientific breakthrough from a team in China could provide a huge step forward in this regard. A team of scientists has discovered a way to use tiny batteries to recycle nearly 100 per cent of the materials within larger lithium-ion batteries in a collaborative project between Central South University in Changsha, Guizhou Normal University, and the National Engineering Research Center of Advanced Energy Storage Materials.
“The discovery uses tiny micro batteries to break down the lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese from a battery, before using an amino acid to extract the metals,” the Independent reported last week. “The use of glycine as the amino acid avoids using harsh chemicals for the recycling process, as well as the creation of toxic byproducts,” the Independent went on to explain. The result is a 99.99% recovery rate of the batteries’ lithium, 96.8% of the nickel, 92.35% of the cobalt and 90.59% in a process lasting just 15 minutes.
This process is vastly more effective, efficient, and eco-friendly than standard methods, according to the team involved. “This green and efficient strategy in neutral solution environment opens a new pathway to realise the large-scale pollution-free recycling of spent batteries,” the researchers wrote in the study, published last month in a German scientific journal. The results promise major improvements over current battery recycling methods, which can be associated with significant greenhouse gas emissions.
This breakthrough comes at a critical time, as lithium demand is set to keep rising, along with lithium prices. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that lithium demand for battery-making alone will increase ten-fold between 2020 and 2030, and a 2023 report from Popular Mechanics calculated that “an electrified economy in 2030 will likely need anywhere from 250,000 to 450,000 tonnes of lithium.” This represents an extreme increase from previous producing and refining rates. For reference, “In 2021, the world produced only 105—not 105,000—tonnes.”
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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