E-Waste Recycling Innovations

🌱 How much gold can be recovered from e-waste? E-waste “often contain[s] large amounts of gold and other heavy metals”. According to the Business Insider, [t]he materials in electronics that are thrown away over the course of a year are worth an estimated $60 billion”. Alone from one ton of dispose

Below you will find a few examples of companies working on solar panel recycling that goes beyond the so-called “bulk recycling”. 🌱 What is bulk recycling? The bulk recycling of solar panels focuses solely on recovering the “high-mass materials”, such as the glass and the metal frames. 🌱 Can sol

🌱 What is graphite used for? Graphite is “a soft form of carbon”. While it used to predominantly be used in the steel industry, it is now a key component in the batteries of electric vehicles (EVs). Since 2018, the end-use market for graphite in batteries has increased by 250% globally. Due to “its

Below are a few innovations in the renewable technology and e-waste management spaces, which either reduce the need for transition minerals or help to (re)win transition minerals with a lower environmental impact: 💡 Sand Batteries The Finnish company, Polar Night Energy, has been working on develo

🌱 Can artificial intelligence (AI) be used to automate the sorting of e-waste? AI can be used to detect objects based on a variety of visual features. This goes beyond what pure color and light-based sensors could do and works similarly to a human eye. In recent years, AI and machine learning has i

🌱 What are aluminum and lithium used for? Aluminum is used in the battery casings of most swappable batteries and in the battery pack enclosures of electric cars (EVs). It is also used in the conductors, cooling systems, crash structures, housing trays, and terminals of batteries. The vast majority

From Wastewater 🌱 Can bacteria recycle REEs from wastewater? Researchers at the Technical University of Munich, in cooperation with the Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences, recycled REEs from an aqueous solution using previously unstudied bacterial strains. They “discovered that the biom