Can Recycling Save the Green Energy Revolution?
Photo by Nareeta Martin
The industrial revolution depended on fossil fuels. The current transition to clean energy aims to leave coal, oil, and natural gas behind. But this transition is also heavily dependent on critical metals like copper, lithium, and nickel. It’s also not clear whether the earth contains enough of these metals to support all the solar installations, wind farms, and electric vehicles that can substitute for the current fossil-fuel infrastructure.
The World Bank estimated in 2019 that the energy transition will require more than three billion tons of critical minerals by 2050. Although the earth’s crust may well contain all those necessary inputs, the available supply in 2030 of lithium, copper, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements will not likely meet the growing demand.
For many governments and businesses, the answer is obvious: more mining. But the footprint for mining associated with the “Green” transition has been growing, and so have the negative consequences.
“Generally speaking, these mines are very polluting,” reports Clàudia Bosch, the Electronics Campaign lead at SETEM Catalunya. “They pollute water. They pollute land and air. Mining also leads to huge levels of deforestation and a loss of biodiversity. Mining is responsible for a large proportion of greenhouse gas emissions, which are contributing to climate change. And mining also has big social impacts.”
Environmentalists have a different answer to the problem of supply: urban mining.
“Urban mining” is a term used to describe the extraction and/or recycling of minerals and other materials from the waste products of renewable energy, such as used solar panels, windmill turbines, and the lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles. It can also encompass greater efforts to repair components so that they don’t enter the waste stream in the first place.
The savings in terms of energy can be quite significant. The amount of energy needed to extract minerals and metals from a cell phone, for instance, is a lot less than producing those materials in the first place. In the case of aluminum, for instance, recycling requires 10 to 15 times less energy. The European Union has set a goal of sourcing 25 percent of all critical raw materials for its energy transition from urban mining.
“Urban mining is one of the necessary measures to gradually reduce the extractivism of minerals,” explains Júlia Martí of the Debt Observatory on Globalization (ODG). “Of course, with current levels of consumption, it won’t solve all the needs we have in terms of minerals. But it could help us advance toward a post-extractivist era.”
However, the production of renewable energy products and their consumption also generate waste. Felix Best Agorvor, of 5seconds Connect in Ghana, specializes in the urban mining of e-waste. His country is a good example of extracting as much benefit from e-waste as possible.
“Ghana generated 52,000 tons of e-waste in 2019,” he explains. “Out of those 52,000 tons of e-waste, only about 5 percent is not processed or recycled.”
If the full potential of recycling could be achieved, would it make a significant dent in the demand for critical raw materials and reduce the need for more extraction in the first place? That’s the question that Martín Lallana, the co-author of a study on mineral use in the energy transition in Spain, has tried to answer, for instance with respect to lithium-ion batteries.
“If we are able to recycle these batteries and re-enter them into a circular economy, we would reduce the total demand for the minerals by 34 percent,” he notes. “In general terms, 67 percent of the total demand for those metals would be recovered through recycling in the optimal scenario.”
In a public conversation in mid-September, these four experts discussed extractivism, waste, consumption, and the future of renewable energy. They also looked very specifically at how recycling, combined with other policies, could dramatically reduce the amount of new mineral inputs—and thus new mines—needed for the transition away from fossil fuels.
The Downsides of Extraction
The modern economy is heavily dependent on materials extracted from the earth. An ordinary smartphone, for instance, contains 60 different elements from the periodic table, many of which have been dug out of the ground.
The environmental impacts of the extraction of critical raw materials are extensive. Nearly 24 million people worldwide are affected by the toxic runoff from mines into rivers and floodplains. According to the World Resources Institute, mining was responsible for destroying 1.4 million hectares of trees from 2001 to 2020. Primary mineral and metal production, meanwhile, is responsible for an estimated 10 percent of all energy-related greenhouse gas emissions.
Then there are the social consequences of mining, including human rights violations. “In the past ten years, there have been more than 600 reports of human rights violations linked to the extraction of minerals for the green transition,” reports Clàudia Bosch of SETEM Catalunya. “Since 2012, more than 19 environmental defenders have been killed.”
Workers in the extractive sector frequently work in unsafe conditions, particularly in the informal or “artisanal” sector where they don’t wear the proper protection. The impact on women is particularly severe. “In places with a lot of mining, we see precarious conditions that lead to violence against women,” she continues. “Women are often in the worst-paid jobs. And exposure to these toxic minerals also have impacts on their reproductive health.”
Like diamonds, many metals are extracted in areas of the world consumed by conflict. Perhaps the most famous example is cobalt, with more than 70 percent of the world’s production coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A desire to control that cobalt has fueled conflict there, for instance encouraging intervention by neighboring Rwanda. Tin and tungsten are also fueling conflict in the DRC.
“Mineral extraction is being used to fund these armed conflicts,” Bosch adds. “Brands like Apple or Alphabet can’t be certain that the minerals in their devices are free of these minerals. Even if they say they’re trying to do their best not to source minerals from mines linked to this type of conflict, in reality everything gets mixed up so that it’s very difficult to be certain that the technology is free of conflict.”
The Problem and Promise of Waste
In 2022, according to the UN, 62 million tons of e-waste was produced, an increase of 82 percent from a dozen years earlier. That’s enough to fill 1.5 million trucks, each with the capacity to carry 40 tons. Less than one-quarter of all that waste was collected and recycled. In fact, the amount of e-waste is growing five times more than the rate of recycling. When it comes to the class of critical raw materials known as rare earth elements, which are so critical to renewable energy production, only one percent makes its way back from e-waste into the industrial supply chain.
Artificial intelligence will only make matters worse by pushing a huge upgrade of electronic devices. AI alone will increase e-waste by anywhere from 3 to 12 percent by 2030.
“Recovering and recycling this e-waste and other forms of waste is a path to explore,” notes Júlia Martí of ODG. “We know that this won’t be able to meet the current demand, which is growing for these minerals. Before opening new mines, we need to make the most of this urban mining, which has a lower environmental and climate impact.”
One of the sources of all this waste is the planned obsolescence of products. Clàudia Bosch distinguishes between two types. “The industry puts all these barriers into place to force us to buy new electronic devices,” she explains. “Our devices are programmed to stop working after a certain time, forcing us to download software updates that leave our devices outdated. Or the batteries stop working. And then there are all the barriers to repairing the devices.”
The second type is perceived obsolescence. “There’s the popular belief that anything new is better,” she continues. “Some people want to buy the latest model of iPhone because it’s better, lighter, smaller, and more ‘fashionable.’”
European countries have the highest e-waste per capita, led by Norway with 26.8 kilos per person per year. The UK and Switzerland are also in the top three. Beginning in 2025, the Basel Convention will regulate international shipments of e-waste. “The Basel Convention tries regulating things so that e-waste isn’t exported to other countries,” reports Bosch. “But sometimes, there are products sent for repair that are mixed up with devices that cannot be repaired. So they end up in dumps. In Ghana, in Accra, there a huge community of people doing repairs, and the repair rate is very high. But this doesn’t mean it’s okay for the Global North to send its waste to other parts of the world.”
There is gold in this e-waste, sometimes literally in the case of the billions of dollars of recovered metals, including gold. Another benefit is the reduction in carbon emissions from replacing those metals. The benefits of just the recoverable materials add up to $91 billion while the costs of treating e-waste in terms of pollution, health consequences, and carbon emissions total $78 billion.
In Spain, Bosch reports, “the average rate of recycling is around 40 percent of what is disposed of adequately. Catalonia is more or less the same. But there’s one figure which makes me especially cross. Some disposed items could be easily repaired and reused, and many of the devices are prematurely recycled. This entails a loss of energy. We have a very low ability to repair things compared to what we could do.”
Consequences for People and the Environment
The extraction of metals from the ground is certainly hazardous for people and the environment. But the extraction of such materials from e-waste also poses risks.
Ghana is a mineral-rich country, with a lot of gold and recently discovered deposits of lithium. Illegal mining, known locally as galamsey, “is destroying our forests, polluting our soil, and polluting our water bodies,” Felix Best Agorvor of 5seconds Connect reports. “Children are being born with all manner of deformities and strange health conditions that we’ve never seen in our history before.”
Ghana is also a leading importer of mineral- and metal-rich e-waste. Every year, legally and illegally, other countries send 150,000 tons of e-waste to Ghana. “The conditions under which e-waste is managed is very, very hazardous,” he continues. “E-waste management in Ghana is a gray area. We have laws on the books, like polluter-pay laws, that are not implemented. Policymakers are now coming to terms with the challenges that e-waste poses for the country, especially the major cities, where it gets into our environment. The acid from the car batteries and the mobile phone batteries pollute our soil. It even gets into our water.”
As with the illegal mining, many problems arise from the recycling of e-waste in the informal sector. “They don’t do the proper segregation of e-waste,” Agorvor adds. “They burn the waste to get the copper or the gold out of it. They don’t have the modern technology to collect, segregate, and recycle this waste. When they burn it, they flare the smoke into the atmosphere, and we all know what that smoke does to the ozone layer and to climate change.”
“There’s filtration of these pollutants into the land, the air and water, which then enters the food chain, and it can end up affecting the whole community,” observes Clàudia Bosch. “This impacts health, with respiratory disease, cancer and other diseases.”
There’s also a lot of waste in the waste business, especially the informal sector. “They only take the materials of greater value and discard other less valuable materials,” she adds, nothing that the Global North has been busy exporting these problems to the Global South, perpetuating inequalities.
Those problems show up in particular among workers in the e-waste recycling sector in the Global South. The rates of accidents even in formal workplaces is high. It’s worse in the informal sector. “Some of these workers collect these things with the bare hands, they burn them or they inhale the smoke,” Agorvor reports. “The burning of the acid from the batteries gives them skin cancers and all manner of lung diseases. People who engage in this e waste collection in Ghana must be properly trained. If we properly tackle this sector, it can generate about one million jobs to employ our youth.”
Clàudia Bosch agrees. “People working in the informal sector do this with no protection equipment, and they’re exposed to hazardous substances such as lead and mercury,” she notes. “Women have a low employment rate in formal waste recycling, but they have a high level of participation in informal waste management. This e-waste management has impacts on their reproductive health.” Also notable is the high rate of accidents in the workplace for those involved in the e-waste recycling sector.
On the Consumption Side
An energy transition that just focuses on production addresses only half the equation. Switching to electricity generation from renewable sources—and away from fossil fuels—is necessary, but not sufficient.
“If we want to keep this current level of consumption, just changing these sources of energy to new alternative energy sources will require new minerals, which are also finite resources and distributed very unequally around our planet,” observes Martín Lallana. “The extraction of these minerals is having huge impacts on the environment and also in terms of human rights. We face a new logic of green extractivism. The extraction of fossil fuels is still continuing. But we’re seeing a shift of extractivism toward other minerals needed for the green transition. And the consequences are just as dangerous as the ones we’ve seen with classic extractivism.”
The bottom line is that there would be less of a demand for those minerals and less of a huge e-waste problem if people didn’t keep throwing out their devices or if those devices were built to last longer.
At SETEM, the Catalonian NGO, “we’ve been working on raising awareness about consuming,” Clàudia Bosch says. “This starts off by rejecting aggressive marketing campaigns that entice us to consume in a compulsive way. We promote a reduction of consumption: to repair, to renovate, to give a new use to things that are still functioning, to allow the recycling industry to recover these raw materials. We’re promoting more sustainable use of materials, to make them last longer.”
This campaign around consumption, she adds, takes place within a degrowth framework. “This is where we need to be heading at all levels, to an understanding that happiness is not only met through material means, that there are many other needs that are more important for our happiness,” she explains. “Things that are not really necessary, that are not contributing to the common good, should not be produced anymore, or not be produced in such large quantities.”
The Challenges of Recycling
There are costs and benefits to the recycling of electronic wastes. Done properly, the process can minimize the impact on workers, the environment, and communities and reduce the dependency on new extractivism. Done properly, the process can provide employment, reduce north-south inequities, and even help change attitudes toward consumption more generally.
But how much can recycling help in the transition away from fossil fuels? Martín Lallana and his team set out to answer that question more precisely.
“Based on Spain’s 2050 decarbonization plans, we wanted to come up with estimates of how much of this demand could be met through recycling raw materials, and which part of the demand had to be met through primary extraction,” he explains. “We tried, with the circular economy alternative, to show how we could increase the recycling rate, meet more demand through recycling, and also reduce demand in absolute terms.”
“We started off using official policy documents, looking at the estimates of the number of electric vehicles for 2030 and the amount of wind energy to be installed by 2050,” he continues. “We then compared these estimates with the type of technologies that will be used: the type of batteries. the type of solar panels. To avoid being too pessimistic, we included trends in terms of technology improvements. Solar panels, for instance, used to carry a huge amount of silver but that’s been reduced over the last 20 years.
They came up with three scenarios based on the mineral requirements for Spain’s transition. In the first scenario, they assumed the optimal rates of recycling established by the government. In the second scenario, those optimal rates weren’t achieved.
“And in the third scenario,” he notes, “we go ahead with the energy transition as set out in policy documents but we accelerate recycling and reach optimal levels in 2030 instead of 2050. We lengthen the useful life of technology.” In this scenario, they imagined that they could extend the lifespan of solar panels from 20 years to 30. They reversed the trend toward larger batteries and EVs and charted an alternative mobility strategy.
“Instead of transitioning from combustion engine vehicles to EVs, we reduced the fleet from 25 million today to 9 million,” he explains. “This entailed a different model of mobility, which would go hand in hand with a drastic increase in public transport, multiplying by three the number of electric buses.”
They determined that, if recycling rates are not improved, “primary extraction would be 40 percent higher.” Along these lines, greater recycling rates, for example, could reduce the demand for lithium—particularly in the 2030s when there is more lithium available to recycle. By 2040, such recycling could meet around 50 percent of the demands for different metals. “From 2040 to 2050, much more technology reaching the end of its useful life will be entering the market, and we can recover these raw materials.”
They also determined that, in the first two scenarios, the bulk of the raw materials would be earmarked for the transportation sector rather than, say, solar or wind energy production. “It would be mainly private electric cars,” he reports. “So, we’ll be looking at minerals like lithium, cobalt, tin, and manganese. More than half of the demand for aluminum and copper would come from this e-mobility.” The key minerals needed for e-mobility—cobalt, lithium, nickel—”are the ones that shoot over the equitable global reserve distribution. If all of these circular economy measures were implemented, we could almost avoid overshoot.”
In all, under the more ambitious recycling targets, “we would be able to cover up to half of the demand for the different metals by 2050,” he adds. “This is a big if. If we have ambitious systems for recovery and recycling, and if we add measures for circular economy and sufficiency that would transform the mobility system, then we would be able to reduce half of the metals that would have to be extracted from the ground.”
Demand would be most efficiently reduced by a shift from private cars to public transportation. But, Llalana cautions, “energy transition isn’t where the greatest demand lies. There’s a greater demand in certain manufacturing sectors, construction and other areas.”
In the end, more ambitious e-waste recycling programs are absolutely necessary. But they are also absolutely insufficient given the current scale of primary extraction and all the ills associated with it. Urban mining needs to be combined with a reduction in overall demand and a standardization of clean energy components to reduce the energy required to extract and recycle the minerals they contain. Urban mining is not a quick fix that can substitute for a more systemic transformation.
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