Developing efficient resource recovery routes from electronic waste

现代社会的基础设施和技术高度依赖金属，因此我们的生活质量。然而，由于它们是不可再生资源，并且从地球上提取这些金属是前所未有的，特别是在过去的两个世纪中，已经引起了对它们的长期可用性的关注，以满足后代的需求。特别值得关注的是金属的地缘政治供应风险，这涉及资源生产国的政治稳定和治理水平，以及一国对全球资源供应的控制，使其具有战略市场优势。最近的稀土元素供应中断问题就是这样一个例子。所有这些因素都日益强调加强从社会积累的达到报废阶段的产品库存-通常称为城市矿山-中回收资源。电子废物是一个快速增长的城市矿山，被视为贵金属和关键金属等宝贵资源的重要来源（关键是因为它们容易面临高供应风险，并且是技术，公司，国家，地区甚至全球等特定系统所需的）。然而，由于现代电子产品的材料和结构复杂性，从电子废物中回收资源充满了技术，环境和经济挑战。

Modern society is highly dependent on metals for infrastructure and technology, and consequently our quality of life. However, as they are non-renewable resource, and there has been an unprecedented extraction of these metals from the earth, especially during the last two centuries, has raised concerns regarding their long-term availability to meet the demand of future generations. Of particular concern is the geopolitical supply risk of metals, which involves political stability and governance level of resource producing countries, and a country’s control of the global supply of a resource, giving them strategic market advantages. The recent issue of the supply disruption of rare earth elements is one such case. All these factors have placed increasing emphasis on enhanced resource recovery from accumulated societal stocks of products reaching their end-of-life stage – commonly referred to as urban mines. Electronic waste (e-waste) is a rapidly growing urban mine and is seen as an important source of valuable resources such as precious and critical metals (critical because they are prone to high supply risk and are required for a particular system such as a technology, company, country, region, or even globally). However, resource recovery from e-waste is fraught with technical, environmental, and economic challenges due to material and structural complexity of modern electronic goods.