First Europe-wide database for secondary raw materials
In January 2018, the first Europe-wide database for secondary raw materials, including many "critical" raw materials, went online. Since then, we know more about which raw material deposits are contained in cars, batteries and electronic devices that are sold, used, stored - and ultimately recycled or disposed of - in 28 EU countries, Norway and Switzerland. Empa played a key role in the creation of the database.
Where are secondary raw materials actually found everywhere? In addition, there are 15 kg of lead batteries and 2 kg of batteries of other types, 500 g of which are lithium-ion batteries, as well as a 60-kg part of an automobile. All these goods eventually break down or become obsolete. Some of it is thrown away and recycled, while others are resold on platforms such as Ebay and Ricardo. Considerable quantities end up in drawers, cupboards and garages, where they form actual raw material stores.
A bunch of fragmented data
Data on the occurrence and distribution of critical raw materials in products, components and waste have been generated in recent years by a wide variety of sources, including research institutions, industry, government agencies and non-governmental organizations, and stored in a wide variety of databases, formats and reports. But no one had yet compiled and processed this data in a way that would have enabled the recycling industry, government agencies and policy makers to incorporate all these raw materials into economically and ecologically sound future planning.
This challenge has been addressed by the project "Pros-pecting Secondary Raw Materials in the Urban Mine and Mining Waste" (ProSUM), funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 research program (www.prosumproject.eu), which involved 17 research institutes from 12 countries as well as three Empa departments, first and foremost the "Technology and Society" department, which was responsible for the Work Package "Product
Characterization" was responsible.
The department headed by Patrick Wäger has been conducting internationally networked research on recycling systems for many years. One research focus is on the handling of electrical and electronic waste, - so-called e-waste - in Switzerland as well as in developing and emerging countries. In recent years, the focus of research activities has expanded to include critical raw materials such as indium, rare earth elements and platinum metals.
A young science
Empa researcher Heinz Böni and his team are investigating the role of critical raw materials in "societal metabolism". This is the term used by environmental researchers to describe the material and energy flows triggered by social activities, by analogy with physical metabolism. The study of this social metabolism is a relatively young science, the foundations of which were laid in the late 1980s by Peter Baccini and Paul Brunner at Eawag, the ETH Domain's water research institute. Since 2007, a research group at Yale University in particular has been systematically working on the assessment of raw material supply risks; among other things, the Yale researchers have developed a "criticality matrix", on the basis of which the EU published its first study on the criticality of raw materials in 2010.
Böni's team focuses in particular on closing material cycles of rare metals and critical raw materials. For example, in a project funded by the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN), the researchers looked at the recovery of neodymium, which is found, for example, in the voice coil magnets of hard disk drives, and the recycling of indium, which is found in flat screens. Empa researchers are currently working on ways of recovering rare metals from electrical and electronic vehicle components and keeping them in the material cycle in this way.
It was researchers from Delft University of Technology who finally asked the Swiss to participate in the Pro-SUM project. "Our colleagues knew us well from collaboration on other projects," says Patrick Wäger, who led one of the five ProSUM Work Packages. The starting point was a database of mineral resources in EU countries developed by the French Research Institute of Geology and Mining (BRGM) as part of an earlier EU research project, "Minerals4EU." Empa researcher Amund Loevik had the task of compiling the scattered data from various sources and putting it into a consistent form. The primary aim was to assess the quality of the data and weight it accordingly.
To tackle this challenging task, Wäger and Co. brought other Empa colleagues on board: Matthias Rösslein from the "Particles-Biology Interactions" department supported Loevik in preparing and evaluating the data using statistical methods. Analytical expert Renato Figi and his team from the Advanced Analytical Technologies department developed and validated new methods for sampling, sample preparation and chemical analysis (see page 16). The main focus was on determining the content of critical raw materials in selected products and in fractions from the processing of spent batteries, waste electrical and electronic equipment, and various shredder fractions from end-of-life vehicles.
In January 2018, the ProSUM database was upgraded to www.urbanmineplatform.eu finally made available to the public. The "Urban Mine Platform" contains data sets on the flows, storage, composition and waste streams of batteries, electrical and electronic equipment and vehicles. This allows researchers, the recycling industry and political decision-makers to query targeted information on past and future developments, for example to estimate the raw material potential of specific urban mine deposits or to develop innovative recovery strategies. (Source: EMPA)
