Among the detritus of modern consumerism—obsolete smartphones, discarded laptops, defunct flat screens—lurks a bounty of rare and critical minerals. Buried in the guts of these gadgets are the metals that drive the 21st-century economy: lithium, cobalt, neodymium, palladium. A record 62m tonnes of electronic waste was produced in 2022, an increase of 82% on 2010 levels, according to last year’s UNITAR Global E‑waste Monitor. Less than a quarter of it was properly collected and recycled.
The buried treasure in your junk drawer
This is economic folly. The metals embedded in electrical and electronic equipment (EEE), anything with a plug or a battery, were worth an estimated $91bn in 2022—enough to bankroll a decent-sized economy. Demand for critical minerals is expected to quadruple by 2040, driven by the race to electrification. But traditional mining cannot keep pace, and many deposits lie in geopolitically fraught regions. Virtually all the planet’s high-grade, easily accessible deposits have already been mined.
Urban mining—the retrieving of valuable materials from e-waste—offers a faster, cheaper and cleaner alternative. While recycling does not eliminate the need for primary mining, it can help sidestep some of the environmental impacts of open-pit excavation and tailings dumps associated with it. Recycling a tonne of smartphones yields more gold than a tonne of ore from a gold mine. Yet today, barely 1% of rare earths are recycled from end-of-life products.
Toxic trade-offs
Inadequate collection and recycling systems, poor product design and a global trade in waste that prioritises offshoring over accountability are partly to blame for woeful recycling rates. Instead of harvesting resources, rich countries often ship their e-waste to poorer ones that are ill-equipped to process it safely. Each year, around 5.1bn kg of used EEE and e-waste cross borders, with 65%—mostly from high- to middle- and low-income countries—moving without oversight. Falsely labelling junk as reusable and dumping it in markets with no capacity to repair or recycle it has fuelled a surge in e-waste, particularly in places least equipped to handle it, according to the UN’s waste report.
E-waste is the world’s fastest-growing waste stream and among the most toxic. Discarded gizmos, often shipped to countries like Ghana under the guise of second-hand goods, end up on the fringes of cities such as Accra. There, children scour dumps for scraps of precious metals, risking exposure to a noxious cocktail of more than 1,000 harmful chemicals, according to WHO. Meanwhile, over 70% of jettisoned fridges, freezers and air-conditioning units, are improperly handled, releasing refrigerants that damage the ozone layer and warm the planet.
From dump sites to circular cities
The response has been sluggish. Most governments urge citizens to recycle but fail to make it convenient or worthwhile. Australia offers a better model, with nearly 700 permanent drop-off sites and regular collection events. Incentives can help too. Trashie, a US-based recycling startup, rewards households with redeemable points for mailing in old electronics, which are then securely wiped and recycled.
What is needed is less exhortation and more investment. Public funds should support recycling infrastructure and urban-mining innovation to recover critical minerals from shredded circuit boards. Better product design could also make disassembly easier, enabling repair, reuse and more efficient material recovery.
There are glimpses of progress. Taiwan has created a profitable circular economy by treating e-waste as a domestic resource. South Korea and the EU are tightening regulation and subsidising recovery technologies. Some companies are developing robotic systems to disassemble electronics automatically—urban equivalents of excavators in a mine. Even cities are aiming to become “fully circular”, including Glasgow by 2045 and Amsterdam by 2050.
But these remain exceptions. If governments and municipalities are serious about securing supply chains, lowering emissions and building a circular economy, urban mining must move from the margins to the mainstream.