Developing efficient resource recovery routes from electronic waste

现代社会在基础设施和技术方面高度依赖金属，因此我们的生活质量也是如此。然而，由于它们是不可再生资源，而且从地球上前所未有地开采这些金属，特别是在过去两个世纪里，人们对它们的长期可用性提出了关切，以满足子孙后代的需求。特别令人担忧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，从而使它们具有战略市场优势。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累积的产品库存中回收资源，这些产品已达到其生命末期阶段，通常被称为城市矿山。电子废物是一种快速增长的城市矿山，被视为贵金属和关键金属等有价值资源的重要来源(至关重要，因为它们容易产生高供应风险，是技术、公司、国家、地区甚至全球等特定系统所需的)。然而，由于现代电子产品材料和结构的复杂性，从电子垃圾中回收资源充满了技术、环境和经济方面的挑战。这项研究计划旨在通过以下方式在加拿大建立改进的电子废物资源化回收途径：1)通过开发加拿大电子产品的历史销售及其累积的社会人均库存的综合数据库，估计当前和未来的电子废物产生量；2)分析电子废物产品样本的金属成分，以估计当前和未来电子废物流中不同金属的理论最大回收潜力；3)通过确定电子废物中不同金属的理论回收潜力和实际回收率之间的差异，评估整个电子废物处理系统的效率；4)测试不同的人工和技术电子垃圾处理系统的组合，比较不同系统的实际资源回收率。这项研究将有助于确定表现最好的系统，从而建立改进的电子废物资源回收路线，这可以减少加拿大对外国进口的依赖，降低供应中断的风险及其对社会的影响。

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. This research program is aimed at establishing improved resource recovery routes from e-waste in Canada by: 1) estimating current and future amount of e-waste generation through development of a comprehensive database of historical sales of electronic goods and their accumulated societal stocks per person in Canada; 2) analyzing metal composition of a sample of e-waste products to estimate theoretical maximum recovery potential of different metals from current and future e-waste streams; 3) assessing efficiency of overall e-waste treatment systems by determining the difference between theoretical recovery potential and actual recovery rate of different metals from e-waste; and 4) testing a combination of different manual and technological e-waste handling systems to compare the actual resource recovery rate in different systems. The research will help identify the best performing system, leading to establishment of improved resource recovery routes from e-waste, which could reduce Canadian dependency on foreign imports and result in lower risk of supply disruptions and the associated implications for society.