What Is ‘Value’ and How Can We Capture It from the Product Value Chain?

The mobile phone industry is based upon the rapid development of handsets and the high turnover of devices in order to drive sales. Phones are often used for shorter periods of time than their designed life, and when discarded it is often through channels that result in lost resource. This unsustainable business model places strain on resources and creates adverse environmental and social impacts. Through interrogation of a stock and flow model, a product-service system (PSS) for a small consumer electronic device, a mobile telephone, is proposed. The points at which value may be extracted from the PSS are identified. A quantitative measure of value is proposed in order to allow the evaluation of the most appropriate time to extract it. This value is not solely monetary, but is derived from the combination of indicators which encompass environmental, economic, and technological factors. A worked example is presented, in which it is found that the precious metals within the phone are the main determinants for value extraction. These metals are found in the printed circuit board, leading to a requirement to design phones for ease of extraction of these components in order to access the value within

Applied WEEE pre-treatment methods: Opportunities to maximizing the recovery of critical metals

WEEE is a fast-growing waste stream that includes potentially hazardous substances, but also valuable secondary raw materials, which can be recovered by adequate recycling and recovery treatment. In the last years, the research interest has moved from the conventional recycling (recovery of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, plastic, glass and other "mass relevant" fractions presented in WEEE), to the innovational recycling, aimed to recover trace elements, such as critical metals (CMs) and rare earth elements (REEs). Currently, the majority of CMs and REEs are lost during the pre-treatment processes. In this paper, an overview of the most relevant e-waste categories and products in terms of CMs and REEs presence, a description of currently applied pre-treatment methods and fate of the observed group of metals during pre-processing phase, as well as general recommendation in order to avoid losses of CMs and REEs within the WEEE treatment chain, are elaborated