Landfills are becoming large concentrations of materials like plastic, aluminum and other. What part of the process of mining landfills and processing the materials for new products, makes mining raw materials from the earth and processing them cheaper?
In: Economics
Commodities analyst here. Basically, lots of processing methods could be economic on a large scale. It’s scaling up that is difficult. Take magnets for example. Most magnets are very small and they are all made of slightly different compositions. Then, they are often encased inside a sealed component, inside your product – such as inside an old school HDD.
We would need to first establish a system of collection to retrieve a large number of old PCs. Maybe encourage people to return them to a drop off point. And then extract the magnet before processing it and to a session it for its composition. It’s this labour intensive part where most of the cost is.
As we start to use much larger such batteries and magnets in wind turbines and EVs, it becomes much more attractive to recycle as the volumes are higher and the material within one magnet has a similar composition. It’s early days yet for these applications as they have a long life span but we will start to see recycling happen more and more in the coming decades. For smaller things like mobile phones, it’s not really worth it.
In movies and tv there will often be inmates on the side of the road picking up trash. I don’t know if this actually ever happens… but I always thought it would be a good idea to put them to work in a landfill instead to sort out the recyclables.
Extracting materials from the landfill is a tedious task. First you have to sort the materials, and because most products are not designed for disassembly, you have to go through a lot of processes to to extract the materials you need. Extracting gold from a circuit board, first demands that you are cutting out the right components. Then dissolving these components in chemicals to get to the gold alloys, then dissolve the alloy to make new chemical bonds that leaves the gold as leftover. Then purifying the gold. In the end it’s a very long and expensive process, and the cost benefit is low.
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