Recently, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), released a new report produced by the International Resources Panel titled, Environmental Risks and Challenges of Anthropogenic Metals Flows and Cycles (2013). The 234-page report available here, discusses the following:
[t]his report, compiled by a group of international experts, focuses on the impact of metals on the environment as well as on their life cycle energy use. Currently, primary metals production is responsible for 7 – 8 % of the total global energy use as well as for severe local environmental impacts. The report suggests to apply best available techniques and to increase recycling of metals, which not only requires significantly less energy per kg metal produced than primary production but also helps decreasing the overall local impacts of mining. However, even if recycling rates are increased, rising global demand for many metals will remain a huge environmental challenge in the next decades worldwide.
Main issues of concern for policy-makers presented in this report:
- presently, the demand for metals is rising rapidly and this trend is expected to continue for the next decades
- a shift towards a renewable energy system implies the material, and especially metal, intensity of energy production will increase even faster
- in future, the energy intensity of the production of metals may increase as a result of mining lesser grade ores. For some metals, a trend of decreasing ore grades is visible, and for more it may become visible over the next decades
Recently, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), released a new report produced by the International Resources Panel titled, Metal Recycling: Opportunities, Limits, Infrastructure (2013). The 320-page report available here, discusses the following:
[d]ue to complex functionality, modern products contain complex mixes of almost any imaginable metal, material and compound. This growing complexity of modern products makes it difficult to extract and reuse valuable metals from waste products due to the laws of physics and related economics. For example, a mobile phone can contain more than 40 elements, including base metals such as copper and tin and precious and platinum-group metals such as silver, gold and palladium.
In order to boost historically low recycling rates, a global move from a Material-Centric to a Product-Centric approach, in which recycling targets specific components of a product and their complexity at its End of Life (EoL) and devises ways to separate and recover them, is essential. Optimizing the recycling of EoL products can avoid losses in efficiency throughout the chain of recycling. The global mainstreaming of such a Product-Centric view will be a remarkable step towards efficient recycling systems, resource efficiency and a Green Economy
Product-Centric recycling is discussed in this report by acknowledged experts. This approach is considered to be an essential enabler of resource efficiency by increasing recycling rates. This report provides a techno-economic, product design and physics basis to address the challenges of recycling increasingly complex products in the 21st century.
