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Recycling Reality: Humans Set to Trash Most Elements on the Periodic Table
the majority of elements on the periodic table and we use almost every element on the periodic table for something or other are also nearly completely unrecycled.
As an example, industrial ecologists Barbara Reck and T.E. Graedel of Yale University compare the fates of nickel versus neodymium. Nickel is ubiquitous, particularly as an alloy for steel. Of the 650,000 metric tons of the silvery-white metal that reached the end of its useful life in one product in 2005, roughly two-thirds were recycled. And that recycled nickel then supplied about one-third of the demand for new nickel-containing products. That means the overall efficiency of human use of nickel approaches 52 percent. Not bad, but there’s room for improvement, given that almost half of all nickel is only used once before it is discarded.
Nearly 16,000 metric tons of neodymium a so-called rare earth metal were employed in 2007, mostly for permanent magnets in everything from hybrid cars to wind turbines. Roughly 1,000 metric tons of the element reached the end of its useful life in one product or another and “little to none of that material is currently being recycled,” the survey authors note. This despite the fact that a “rare earth crisis” stems from China’s near monopoly of the neodymium trade.
Mining for neodymium is not benign (which is why the world lets China monopolize its production). And it’s not just neodymium. Mining waste or tailings, leach ponds, slurries and the like are among the world’s largest chronic waste problems. North America alone produces 10 times as much mining waste as it does the municipal solid waste (as it’s known) from all the neighborhoods in the U.S. Much of that is just rock, sand and dust the mountaintop in mountaintop removal mining. And mined products also cause waste further down the product line, such as the ash leftover after the coal is burned (the U.S.’s largest single form of waste).
This issue of profligate use gets worse: we are currently making this problem even harder to solve. How? One word: gadgets. In most gadgets you can think of, tiny amounts of rare elements are used to enhance functionality. As the industrial ecologists write in Science: “The more intricate the product and the more diverse the materials set it uses, the better it is likely to perform, but the more difficult it is to recycle so as to preserve the resources that were essential to making it work in the first place.” It’s as true of iPhones as it is of photovoltaic panels and none of them have shown much success in being recycled. “End of life losses will also increase sharply soon,” unless something changes, the industrial ecologists warn.
http://news.yahoo.com/recycling-reality-humans-set-trash-most-elements-periodic-220200185.html
As an example, industrial ecologists Barbara Reck and T.E. Graedel of Yale University compare the fates of nickel versus neodymium. Nickel is ubiquitous, particularly as an alloy for steel. Of the 650,000 metric tons of the silvery-white metal that reached the end of its useful life in one product in 2005, roughly two-thirds were recycled. And that recycled nickel then supplied about one-third of the demand for new nickel-containing products. That means the overall efficiency of human use of nickel approaches 52 percent. Not bad, but there’s room for improvement, given that almost half of all nickel is only used once before it is discarded.
Nearly 16,000 metric tons of neodymium a so-called rare earth metal were employed in 2007, mostly for permanent magnets in everything from hybrid cars to wind turbines. Roughly 1,000 metric tons of the element reached the end of its useful life in one product or another and “little to none of that material is currently being recycled,” the survey authors note. This despite the fact that a “rare earth crisis” stems from China’s near monopoly of the neodymium trade.
Mining for neodymium is not benign (which is why the world lets China monopolize its production). And it’s not just neodymium. Mining waste or tailings, leach ponds, slurries and the like are among the world’s largest chronic waste problems. North America alone produces 10 times as much mining waste as it does the municipal solid waste (as it’s known) from all the neighborhoods in the U.S. Much of that is just rock, sand and dust the mountaintop in mountaintop removal mining. And mined products also cause waste further down the product line, such as the ash leftover after the coal is burned (the U.S.’s largest single form of waste).
This issue of profligate use gets worse: we are currently making this problem even harder to solve. How? One word: gadgets. In most gadgets you can think of, tiny amounts of rare elements are used to enhance functionality. As the industrial ecologists write in Science: “The more intricate the product and the more diverse the materials set it uses, the better it is likely to perform, but the more difficult it is to recycle so as to preserve the resources that were essential to making it work in the first place.” It’s as true of iPhones as it is of photovoltaic panels and none of them have shown much success in being recycled. “End of life losses will also increase sharply soon,” unless something changes, the industrial ecologists warn.
http://news.yahoo.com/recycling-reality-humans-set-trash-most-elements-periodic-220200185.html
