The DOI matches its Crossref record; 35 of the 35 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Urban Mining of E-Waste is Becoming More Cost-Effective Than Virgin Mining
Abstract
Stocks of virgin-mined materials utilized in linear economic flows continue to present enormous challenges. E-waste is one of the fastest growing waste streams, and threatens to grow into a global problem of unmanageable proportions. An effective form of management of resource recycling and environmental improvement is available, in the form of extraction and purification of precious metals taken from waste streams, in a process known as urban mining. In this work, we demonstrate utilizing real cost data from e-waste processors in China that ingots of pure copper and gold could be recovered from e-waste streams at costs that are comparable to those encountered in virgin mining of ores. Our results are confined to the cases of copper and gold extracted and processed from e-waste streams made up of recycled TV sets, but these results indicate a trend and potential if applied across a broader range of e-waste sources and metals extracted. If these results can be extended to other metals and countries, they promise to have positive impact on waste disposal and mining activities globally, as the circular economy comes to displace linear economic pathways.
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Cites
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Cited by
Mariotti, N., Bonomo, M., Fagiolari, L., Barbero, N., Gerbaldi, C., Bella, F., & Barolo, C. (2020) · Green Chemistry · doi:10.1039/d0gc01148g · Cited by 499
Balaram, V., Santosh, M., Satyanarayanan, M., Srinivas, N., & Gupta, H. (2024) · Geoscience Frontiers · doi:10.1016/j.gsf.2024.101868 · Cited by 231
Analysis of e-waste recycling behavior based on survey at a Midwestern US University
Arain, A. L., Pummill, R., Adu-Brimpong, J., Becker, S., Green, M., Ilardi, M., Van Dam, E., & Neitzel, R. L. (2020) · Waste Management · doi:10.1016/j.wasman.2020.02.002 · Cited by 121
Why are obsolete mobile phones difficult to recycle in China?
Liu, J., Bai, H., Zhang, Q., Jing, Q., & Xu, H. (2019) · Resources, Conservation and Recycling · doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2018.10.030 · Cited by 113
Environmentally sound system for E-waste: Biotechnological perspectives
Awasthi, A. K., Hasan, M., Mishra, Y. K., Pandey, A. K., Tiwary, B. N., Kuhad, R. C., Gupta, V. K., & Thakur, V. K. (2019) · Current Research in Biotechnology · doi:10.1016/j.crbiot.2019.10.002 · Cited by 64
Metadata
- Authors
- Zeng, X., Mathews, J. A., & Li, J.
- Venue
- Environmental Science & Technology
- Publisher
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- Published
- 2018-04-04
- Volume
- 52
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 4835-4841
- ISSN
- 0013-936X (ISSN-L)
- 1520-5851
- OpenAlex
- W2796410703
- Cited by
- 428
- References
- 35
- FWCI
- 31.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Zeng, X., Mathews, J. A., & Li, J. (2018). Urban Mining of E-Waste is Becoming More Cost-Effective Than Virgin Mining. Environmental Science & Technology. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b04909
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
