E-Waste In Landfills – What Can Be Done?

There are many different techniques utilised across the Planet for e-waste recovery. These include landfill mining bioleaching, pyrolysis and more. As technology and techniques improve, e-waste recovery will become more efficient. We recently wrote about how to divert e-waste from landfill that you can read here.

What About Existing E-Waste?

E-waste is the fastest growing solid waste stream in the world. Fortunately, with refurbished hardware growing in popularity we may begin to see the constant increase of e-waste generation begin to slow down. This is of course a positive step, but it does not address often forgotten elephant in the room: what can be done about the e-waste already found in landfills? We can do everything in our power to reduce the increasing amount of e-waste, however there is damage coming from the existing electronics in landfill that needs to be addressed.

Landfill Mining

Exactly as it sounds, landfill mining aims to extract waste from a landfill to reduce its environmental impact and to extract valuable materials, including gold, silver and platinum. This is the most straightforward way of pulling valuable materials from landfill but does not separate it from the other waste that it is surrounded by, meaning that, more often than not, very little is recovered.

Manual Sorting

This is still the regular first step in most cases of e-waste recycling, and more so refers to the act of separating different types of e-waste from each other rather than separating e-waste from regular waste. This strategy holds both positives and negatives. On the plus side, it creates employment opportunities and therefore can help boost our economy. A highly skilled workforce can also sort e-waste with less risk of causing damage to the equipment than a machine might.

The downsides of manual sorting include health risks that come with potential exposure to hazardous materials and chemicals, and the time it can take to manually sort through a large amount of e-waste. To put this into perspective, 70% of all toxic waste is e-waste.

Advanced Sorting Technology

AI is set to revolutionise the way we do a lot of things, and dealing with e-waste is one of them. The potential of training an AI tool to identify e-waste within other types of waste and then having a way to sort it accordingly will be a huge step towards recovering valuable metals.

Combined with the existing strategies of optical sorters and magnetic separators, there is immense potential in the ability to physically extract e-waste from other waste, in turn increasing the amount of e-waste available from which to extract precious metals.

Chemical Leaching

The current drawback with this technique comes from the solution used: Nitro-hydrochloric acid features heavily in the solution and unfortunately makes the solution non-recyclable. This means that although it allows for precious metals to be reused, it does still have a negative impact on the environment itself.

Additionally, this technique is only capable of recovering one precious metal, usually gold, at the expense of all others, so it is not entirely efficient.

However, there are much more sustainable alternatives for chemical leaching. For example, The Royal Mint utilise a patented chemical that is not only capable of extracting up to 99% of gold from e-waste, but also it is both recyclable and reusable.

Bioleaching

This technique uses living organisms, such as bacteria, to separate hazardous substances and materials from the main body of the electronic hardware. It is a cost effective, environmentally friendly technique that can effectively remove precious metals such as copper, gold and silver. Bioleaching is one of the newer and exciting strategies for recycling materials.

Mechanical Separation

Mechanical separation involves the use of physical force to remove materials from the base component. This can involve vibrating, rotating and screening. This technique has its place with certain types of e-waste, such as circuit boards, but it is unsuitable for other equipment as it can cause damage.

Pyrolysis

If all else fails, set it on fire! Pyrolysis is a technique that consists of heating up the e-waste in a vacuum to separate the individual metals from each other.

There are a few main benefits to pyrolysis over other techniques, a major one being its ability to recover multiple metals at once while producing char, oil and gas that can be used as an energy source. It also degrades the toxic components of e-waste which is often a major difficulty associated with the e-waste recycling process.

In comparison to other techniques, it is also much more straightforward to scale. The drawbacks come with the initial setup costs and the specific conditions required for it to operate efficiently are also extremely energy intensive, which can somewhat affect the positive choice being made through recycling.

The Time to Act is Now

All these different techniques are viable strategies and work towards addressing the e-waste crisis. Although we may not be digging into landfills ourselves, at Techbuyer, we aim to be at the cutting edge of e-waste recycling technology through our partnerships. As previously mentioned, this can be seen through our collaboration with The Royal Mint, who utilise a number of these techniques in their resource recovery process.

Click here to explore our Resource Recovery page or read more of our articles below.

Why is it Important to Recycle e-waste? - read more

How do We Decrease the E-waste Crisis? - read more

The Toxic Threat of E-waste - read more