Metal may be the basis of modern economics, but that does not mean they are always there.A study looking at the economic life of 61 metallurgy instruments found that more than half had a life expectancy of less than 10 years. The study, published May 19 in Nature Sustainability1, also shows that most of these metals end up being discarded or lost in bulk, rather than recycled or reused.Billions of tons of iron are mined every year, and the production of iron accounts for about 8 percent of the world’s air pollution. Therefore, the recycling of large amounts of iron can help reduce its impact on the environment, says author Christoph Helbig, an industrialist at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.
Says Helbig: “The longer we use metal, the less likely it is to mine. “But before we can figure out how to close those loops, we need to know where they are.”The fact that the hemorrhages metal economy is well documented, says Thomas Graedel, an industrial environmentalist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Loss can occur at any stage of the life of the metal. Some metals are mined as back-end products during mining but have never been manufactured. Some are lost during use when parts or equipment disintegrate, or are converted into other substances, such as fertilizers, that eventually disperse into the environment. But research has found that waste and recycling – when metals end their lives in landfills or recycled plants – account for 84% of the world’s accumulated iron losses.
Most of the previous studies that tried to quantify this loss looked at individual instruments without examining the broader context, Graedel said. Helbig and his colleagues collected and compared data from several industries to determine how long the different metals remained useful, how they were lost and whether they could be recycled. They found that in most metals, only a small portion was recycled. The alternatives include gold, which has been used for centuries and can be used again and again, as well as iron and lead. A few selected ‘most important’ metals in the European Union and the United States have high loss rates and low recycling rates. These include cobalt, a major component of aircraft engines and lithium-ion batteries, and gallium, which play a key role in semiconductors used in cell phones and other devices.
Another way to improve recycling would be to authorize new products to be recycled, Helbig said. For example, the European Union is considering introducing a requirement that other types of batteries be made using recycled lithium, nickel, cobalt and lead.Recycling alloys – a mixture of two or more metals – can be technically and economically challenging, notes Philip Nuss, a biologist and industrialist at the German Environmental Agency in Dessau-Roßlau. However, giving steel a second, third or fourth life is crucial to building a sustainable economy, Helbig said.
Source Journal Reference: Freda Kreier, Metal-lifespan analysis shows scale of waste, Nature News (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01467-8, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01467-8
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