State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment , Tsinghua University , Beijing 100084 , China.
Macquarie Graduate School of Management , Macquarie University , Sydney New South Wales 2109 , Australia.
Environ Sci Technol. 2018 Apr 17;52(8):4835-4841. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.7b04909. Epub 2018 Apr 4.
Stocks of virgin-mined materials utilized in linear economic flows continue to present enormous challenges. E-waste is one of the fastest growing waste streams, and threatens to grow into a global problem of unmanageable proportions. An effective form of management of resource recycling and environmental improvement is available, in the form of extraction and purification of precious metals taken from waste streams, in a process known as urban mining. In this work, we demonstrate utilizing real cost data from e-waste processors in China that ingots of pure copper and gold could be recovered from e-waste streams at costs that are comparable to those encountered in virgin mining of ores. Our results are confined to the cases of copper and gold extracted and processed from e-waste streams made up of recycled TV sets, but these results indicate a trend and potential if applied across a broader range of e-waste sources and metals extracted. If these results can be extended to other metals and countries, they promise to have positive impact on waste disposal and mining activities globally, as the circular economy comes to displace linear economic pathways.
线性经济流程中使用的原始矿产库存仍然带来巨大挑战。电子废物是增长最快的废物之一，有可能发展成为一个无法控制的全球性问题。从废物中提取和纯化贵金属的资源回收和环境改善的有效管理形式是可行的，这种形式被称为城市采矿。在这项工作中，我们利用来自中国电子废物处理商的真实成本数据证明，可以以与矿石原生矿开采相当的成本从电子废物流中回收纯铜和金锭。我们的结果仅限于从由回收的电视机组成的电子废物流中提取和加工的铜和金的情况，但如果应用于更广泛的电子废物来源和提取的金属，这些结果表明存在一种趋势和潜力。如果这些结果可以扩展到其他金属和国家，它们有望对全球废物处理和采矿活动产生积极影响，因为循环经济正在取代线性经济模式。
