This article appeared in the 2024 issue of E-Scrap News. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

One of e-scrap recycling’s chief concerns boils down to mining copper, gold and other metals all over again, this time from within piles of cell phones and computers rather than veins of ore.

The U.S. Department of Energy has dubbed these substances “critical minerals” because of their importance to electric vehicles, solar panels and other ubiquitous technologies, with the federal government putting millions of dollars in grants and other support on the line for the minerals’ recovery. Globally, energy-critical mineral trade reaches hundreds of billions of dollars each year, according to the World Trade Organization.

Researchers and companies across the globe therefore continue to seek more efficient and economic methods for these metals’ extraction via creative chemistry and even biology. What follows are some of the big steps they’ve taken over the past year.

Feds seek to ‘defragment’ sector

A technology manager with the DOE said improving e-scrap management fits squarely within the federal government’s material sourcing and climate goals, so the agency last spring launched a new funding and technical assistance opportunity targeting electronics recovery.

The department on March 6 announced the Electronics Scrap Recycling Advancement Prize, or E-SCRAP. It’s a competition for a broad range of applicants connected to the electronics recycling industry, with multiple phases highlighting different stages of project implementation.

Jeremy Mehta, technology manager within the department’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, said the department has invested in a number of e-scrap recovery-related projects over the past decade, particularly in the separation and material extraction stage. For example, the department is a funding partner of the REMADE Institute, which supports research and development related to recycling, reuse and remanufacturing. Other government branches including the U.S. military have also funded such efforts.

The E-SCRAP prize aims to build on that work and connect it to other segments of the end-of-life electronics sector.

“We see this prize as being an effective tool to bridge some of the different players that exist along the value chain, from collection to sorting, to concentration, to preprocessing, to actual separation and extraction,” Mehta said. “It’s a fragmented value chain … and we’re trying to defragment that.”

The prize has three phases, with the first focused on incubation-stage projects; applications were due early this month. The department will choose 10 competitors to each receive $50,000 in cash and $30,000 in analysis and support from a national laboratory. During this phase, selected competitors “will propose solutions that have the potential to substantially increase the amount of recovered critical materials from electronic waste and used in U.S. manufacturing,” according to the program.

The second phase will focus on prototype projects. It’s another open application process, so even projects that aren’t selected for the incubation phase can apply again. During this stage, “competitors will prototype their innovation and begin collecting and/or generating data that can be used to optimize technoeconomic strategy and life cycle impacts between partners along the recycling value chain,” the department stated.
The third phase is a demonstration, where competitors will implement what they’ve come up with and propose ways to scale it up. Mehta said the prize would be suitable for applicants from many backgrounds, including but not limited to e-scrap processors, end users and researchers.

Bacteria help recover rare earths

A team of Austrian researchers developed what they describe as a cost-effective and non-polluting method to recover rare earth metals from electronics, and in June they said they’ve achieved recovery rates of up to 85% from the e-scrap stream.

In the collaboration between multiple Austrian research universities, researchers tested a two-stage bacterial process for recovering both common metals and rare earths from shredded e-scrap.

They found that the acids produced by specific microorganisms are able to leach iron, copper, aluminum and other metals from the stream, and that with these metals leached out, separate bacteria draw in the remaining rare earth metals through a process called “bio-accumulation.” Without the first stage, the common metals interfere with this process of accumulation, so both steps are needed for rare earth recovery.

Escherichia coli, better known as the E. coli behind common gastrointestinal illnesses, was found to be the “most successful accumulator of rare earths,” the researchers noted.

They suggested several benefits to their bacterial approach over the current standard practices.

“The methods currently used to extract rare earths are based on chemical processes, which are associated with the formation of environmentally harmful by-products and the creation of new problematic substances,” the university said in a written summary. “A combination of biotechnological methods has clear advantages over chemical methods, as both the leaching and the accumulation in the cells of the bacteria are environmentally friendly and sustainable, and no hazardous or polluting substances are produced at any stage of the process.”

They added a caveat that the process needs to be refined to be able to handle the typical varying concentrations of different metals in the e-scrap stream. This is the current area of research, they added, with a goal of making the process “reproducible and reliable” with any inbound ratio of metals.

The research was conducted by the University of Natural resources and Applied Life Sciences, abbreviated as BOKU in Austria, and the IMC University of Applied Sciences Krems.

The Austrian research joins a growing body of work to explore a variety of recovery processes for rare earth metals. One recent project examined a method that does not involve any acid, while another explored what the researchers described as “membrane solvent extraction.” That process involves dissolving rare earth magnets in acid and feeding the resulting liquid through a membrane that only allows the rare earth component to come through.

Using saltwater for metal recovery

Researchers at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found a way to recover some critical metals from e-scrap using a mixed-salt water-based solution.

Materials separation scientist Qingpu Wang led a team to develop this method to selectively recover manganese, magnesium, dysprosium and neodymium by dissolving the e-scrap containing them in continuously flowing reaction chambers, according to a press release in April.

The method relies on the behavior of metals when placed in a reaction chamber in which two different liquids are flowing together. Dissolved metals will form solids at different rates, which the researchers used to separate and purify them.

“Our goal is to develop an environmentally friendly and scalable separation process to recover valuable minerals from e-waste,” Wang said. “Here we showed that we can spatially separate and recover nearly pure rare earth elements without complex, expensive reagents or time-consuming processes.”

The first success occurred in February, when the researchers successfully separated neodymium and dysprosium from a mixed liquid. The separation process took four hours using their method, while conventional separation methods typically take around 30 hours.

Wang said the next goal is to modify the design of the reactor to recover a larger amount of product.

Building off that research and using a complementary technique, Wang and materials scientist Elias Nakouzi recovered nearly pure manganese from a solution that mimicked dissolved lithium-ion battery waste.

They used a gel-based system that relied on the different transport and reactivity rates of the metals in the sample.

“The beauty in this process is its simplicity,” Nakouzi said. “Rather than relying on high-cost or specialty materials, we pared things back to thinking about the basics of ion behavior. And that’s where we found inspiration.”

OEM invests in Cyclic Materials

Cyclic Materials received an investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund to accelerate the company’s technology for recovering rare earth metals from hard drives, the Canadian metals recycler announced in July.

Cyclic has developed a patent-pending technology to recycle rare earths from end-of-life hard drives and other materials. The technology allows ITAD companies to separate out the parts of hard drives that have rare earth magnets and still shred the rest of the hard drive to recover the other precious metals that are typically targeted.

Microsoft launched the Climate Innovation Fund in 2020 and planned to invest $1 billion into new technologies over four years. It does not disclose individual investment amounts. Brandon Middaugh, senior director of the Climate Innovation Fund, said in a press release that “as demand for rare earth elements continues to grow in importance, we’re excited to support the creation of a sustainable supply of these materials with this investment.”

Cyclic Materials co-founder and CEO Ahmad Ghahreman said in a written statement that the investment “enables us to accelerate the deployment of our commercial facilities, which is a critical step in growing the domestic supply of rare earths in North America that support the energy transition.”

In June, Cyclic Materials opened its first commercial-scale facility in Ontario, Canada, and plans to develop five or six facilities in the U.S. and Canada that will feed magnets into a future hub.

Sims Lifecycle Services has been testing the company’s technology over the past few months and has “seen tremendous performance improvements through the development and achieved throughput of one hard drive per second,” said Sean Magann, chief commercial officer at Sims Lifecycle Services, in a written statement.

“This solution enables us to drive further value out of disposed hard drives, by reclaiming the critical rare earths, while maintaining the data security,” Magann said, noting that another benefit is fewer magnets clogging up shredders. “We look forward to deploying this technology across our operations.”

This article appeared in the 2024 issue of  E-Scrap News. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Though the right to repair consumer electronics has been written into law in only a handful of states, the past year has nevertheless brought a sea change to the movement.

Oregon and Colorado both passed right-to-repair legislation last spring, two years after New York became the first state to do so and a year after Minnesota and California followed suit.

Though they differ in specifics, generally these laws require OEMs to make available to independent repair shops and consumers the parts, tools and documentation needed to fix devices. Manufacturers have traditionally controlled repair work in various ways, such as by limiting repairs to authorized providers.

While Oregon and Colorado were fourth and fifth in line, respectively, they were the first to ban the use of software to ensure a device will only operate with specific individual parts, or parts pairing, which can interfere with third-party repairs or with device functionality afterward.

“We have supported legislative efforts to protect a consumer’s right to repair their own products because doing so reduces waste, saves consumers money and offers consumers more choice when it comes to maintaining their expensive gadgets and appliances,” Justin Brookman, director of tech policy at Consumer Reports, said in a written statement after Oregon’s passage.

“With software becoming an essential element in today’s products, Consumer Reports backs laws that prevent software from becoming a tool to enforce manufacturers’ monopolies on the repair process.”
Apple voiced its opposition to Oregon’s parts pairing provision, according to TechCrunch, with John Perry, senior manager of secure system design, telling lawmakers in February that the ban will undermine security and privacy for customers.

“It’s important to understand why Apple and other smartphone manufacturers use parts pairing. It’s not to make repair more difficult,” Perry said. “It is, in fact, to make access to repair easier while also making sure your device — and the data stored on it — remain secure.”

Yet Apple broadly supported the legislation’s other provisions, further highlighting how the right-to-repair movement’s landscape has changed in the last 12 months.

Speaking alongside federal officials last October, Brian Naumann, vice president and general manager of Apple’s repair business, said the tech behemoth supported a federal right-to-repair law as long as it balances repairability with durability, security and physical safety. And Google in January endorsed an Oregon bill as a “compelling model.”

SB 542, a right-to-repair bill that died in the 2023 session and didn’t include the parts pairing provision, “represents an inclusive compromise that brings tech companies, small repair companies, environmental leaders and legislators to the table to find common ground and support the repair movement,” the company wrote in a press release. “This would be a win for consumers who are looking for affordable repair options, for the environment and for companies that want to invest in making their products more repairable and sustainable.”

Bumps in the road

That’s not to say right-to-repair has an open field among state legislatures. Out of more than 20 right-to-repair electronics bills introduced as of July, a dozen had failed in Illinois, New York, Rhode Island, Washington and elsewhere.

Corporate support has come with its bumps as well. In public comments on a right-to-repair petition to the Federal Trade Commission early this year, small repair business owners, industry associations or passionate individuals disagreed over whether the commission should set national right-to-repair rules.

The Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), an agricultural lobbying group, encapsulated the divide. The federation over the past year secured memorandums of understanding with John Deere and other manufacturers to make it easier for farmers to repair their equipment. It also opposed the FTC petition, saying an industry- and manufacturer-specific approach is best.

“When AFBF’s members charged the organization with outreach to equipment manufacturers on the right to repair, they expressed a preference for private sector, market-based solutions over legislation,” the group wrote to the commission. “AFBF’s members believe it is about sitting down at the table and sorting things out.”

Farm Action, another agricultural advocacy group, said it “wholly supports the petition,” pointing to the vastly increased complexity of combines and other machines. A federal rule could give explicit, consistent boundaries for what is and isn’t allowed, it said.

“Farmers know best how global equipment manufacturers like John Deere have obstructed their operations, coerced inflated repair costs from them and violated their consumer rights with the denial of basic information,” the group wrote.

In May, repair organization iFixit ended its Repair Hub partnership with Samsung after two years of effort, citing the OEM’s lack of commitment. As of June, iFixit was no longer Samsung’s designated third-party parts and tools distributor and would no longer collaborate with the company on new repair manuals.

“It’s with a heavy wrench that we have decided to end our partnership with Samsung,” iFixit said in a written statement, pointing to such problems as costly parts that are glued together. “Despite a huge amount of effort, Samsung’s approach to repairability does not align with our mission.”

Samsung didn’t return emailed requests for comment in May. In a written statement to news outlet The Verge, Samsung head of mobile customer care Mario Renato De Castro said, “We’re proud of the work we’ve done together with iFixit. We can’t comment further on partnership details at this time.”

The Verge also reported that Encompass’s SamsungParts.com became the company’s one-stop shop for self-repair.

Robert Coolidge, CEO of Encompass, in an August interview said his business is built around supplying replacement parts for consumer electronics. He saw right-to-repair laws as a benefit for consumers and manufacturers alike, given the right safety guardrails.

“Allowing consumers to repair their products gives them more brand confidence,” he said. “It puts the decision-making back to the consumer, which I think is super important.”

On the manufacturing side, self-awareness is needed “to understand truly it’s a benefit to their brand,” Coolidge added. “Manufacturers are sometimes very protective, but also are doing so because that’s the way they’ve been doing it forever.”

Encompass deals exclusively in OEM parts, and Coolidge said in his eyes, the most important aspects of right-to-repair laws are to “educate the consumer on the impact of having the right part from the manufacturer” and for consumers to know their own limitations when it comes to making repairs.

Coolidge also noted that manufacturers need to be involved in crafting legislation, because they are more qualified than lawmakers to understand which repairs are too risky to do at home and what segments are best suited to be covered by right-to-repair laws.

“Giving the consumer the right to fix what they buy, I think that’s important,” he said.

Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, said that while safety is certainly a concern, there is a laundry list of other laws that govern the issue.

Under ownership law, the only party responsible for safety is the equipment owner, she said. OEMs also are required to build products that are safe to use, she said — including to repair.

In the past, groups such as CTIA, a trade association representing the wireless communications industry, and the Consumer Technology Association have proposed adding various guardrails, trainings and qualifications to right-to-repair legislation, Gordon-Byrne said, but those efforts have failed for the above reasons.

State-level details

Oregon’s new law requires consumer electronics and household appliance manufacturers to provide documentation, tools and parts for diagnosing, maintaining or repairing the equipment.

The parts pairing provision bans OEMs from preventing repairs using unapproved parts and from reducing “the functionality or performance of consumer electronic equipment.” The bill also notes that OEMs cannot “cause consumer electronic equipment to display misleading alerts or warnings, which the owner cannot immediately dismiss, about unidentified parts.”

The bill does not cover motor vehicles, off-road vehicles, farming equipment, medical devices, HVAC systems, solar panels or solar energy storage systems, video game consoles, electrical energy storage systems or electric toothbrushes.

The parts pairing restrictions will apply to electronics manufactured for the first time and first sold or used in the state after Jan. 1. The bill passed out of the Senate on a bipartisan vote of 25-5 in February, then passed out of the House on a 42-13 vote the next month.

In Colorado, this year’s legislation broadened the scope of the state’s right-to-repair law, which covers wheelchairs and farm equipment. The law covers all digital electronic equipment manufactured and first sold or used in Colorado on or after July 1, 2021, “that depends in whole or in part on digital electronics embedded in or attached to the product in order for the product to function as intended.” It excludes video game consoles, non-wheelchair medical equipment, motor vehicles, marine vessels and fire alarms.

“Imagine if every time your car broke down, the only option you had for repair was the dealer. That’s not a world any of us want to live in,” state Sen. Jeff Bridges, one of the bill’s sponsors, said during a committee hearing, according to Colorado Public Radio. CTIA spoke in opposition.

“The marketplace already provides a wide range of consumer choices for repair with varying levels of quality, price and convenience without the mandates imposed by this legislation,” said Michael Blank, the organization’s director of state legislative affairs.

Colorado’s law goes into effect Jan. 1, 2026.

This article appeared in the 2024 issue of  E-Scrap News. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Upcoming changes to the Basel Convention are likely to disrupt some industry practices when they take effect next year. They’ve already had one remarkable impact: bringing together two often rival certification organizations to advocate for industry-wide compliance with the new rules.

Just a few years ago, the idea of any joint collaboration between the Basel Action Network and Sustainable Electronics Recycling International was virtually unheard of. The two organizations respectively administer the major e-scrap certifications, e-Stewards and R2, and although many companies are certified to both standards, they have historically had an acrimonious relationship.

The certifications have developed “opposing camps” and engaged in “more than a little mud-slinging,” one e-scrap operator and former e-Stewards employee noted in a 2021 E-Scrap News op-ed. As a couple examples, BAN has criticized SERI’s historically less stringent attitude on material exports; SERI has criticized BAN’s tactics and presentation of findings; and the certifications are sometimes pitted against each other competitively by state programs picking one certification to which participating processors must adhere.

So it was perhaps an understatement when Selena Turnock, certification director for e-Stewards, noted in a July 16 webinar that the attendees were “witnessing a little bit of history,” as the event marked the first event presented jointly by BAN and SERI.

Broadly speaking, the upcoming Basel changes, which have been detailed at length in E-Scrap News and will be the subject of a plenary session at the upcoming 2024 E-Scrap Conference, categorize a wider array of electronics as regulated materials under the convention. They come on top of 2021 changes that classified mixed plastic, including e-plastics from electronics, as regulated materials.

In general, Basel-regulated material requires more notification and paperwork before it can be exported, but it’s a different story for companies operating in the U.S., which is one of the few countries that is not party to the convention. Under the Basel rules, regulated material is not allowed to be shipped from non-party countries to party nations, with some limited exceptions.

That means under a strict reading of Basel rules, come Jan. 1, U.S. e-scrap companies will no longer be able to export their output to virtually any overseas buyers. It’s a huge change, and one that ITAD companies aware of the regulations are figuring out how to handle.

“It really has become the de facto agreement for the circular economy,” said Paul Hagen, an attorney with Beveridge & Diamond and a longtime Basel expert, speaking during a panel at the ISRI2024 conference in Las Vegas in April.

The collaboration between BAN and SERI emerged about a year ago. During the webinar, Jim Puckett, executive director of BAN, said that his group learned at that time that a lot of U.S. recycling companies were exporting scrap plastic overseas despite the 2021 Basel Convention amendment that brought such scrap plastic into Basel regulation. BAN found the exports of scrap plastic — including e-plastics from electronics recycling facilities — were going primarily to Malaysia, which doesn’t have an agreement allowing imports from the U.S. to occur outside of Basel regulations.

“This was very concerning,” Puckett said. “We knew we couldn’t just go this alone and alert the whole industry by ourselves.”

So BAN reached out to SERI, he said, and began a coordinated response as the two major certifying organizations in the e-scrap space. Their first public collaboration was an op-ed in E-Scrap News, urging the industry to adhere to Basel regulations despite the challenge.

“That was the beginning of a joint effort to educate the industry, and alert the industry hopefully in a more timely manner as to developments at Basel as they affect our industry,” Puckett said.

The webinar, which can be viewed on e-Stewards’ website, marked a way for the groups to lay out regulations to certified companies, so they know how the regulations apply to the materials they handle, and so they can remain in compliance with the standards, said Mike Easterbrook, chief of global standards for SERI.

From SERI’s perspective, adherence to the recent and upcoming Basel guidelines is paramount for R2-certified recycling companies and is indeed a requirement for maintaining that certification, Easterbrook explained. He said a requirement of being certified is demonstrating that the company has a process in place to show compliance with applicable laws, such as Basel, and that the compliance audits are conducted by the certifying organization, either R2 or e-Stewards.

“Many customers that require R2 or e-Stewards certification would expect legal compliance from that facility, as a bare minimum,” Easterbrook said. “Compliance is non-optional for certified companies.”

A global watchdog

BAN has assumed an active role in holding the e-scrap sector to the convention’s more stringent regulations. In July it rolled out a confidential reporting website, the BAN Whistleblower Portal, seeking to make it easier for observers to report poor e-scrap management practices, such as questionable exports of devices and e-plastics, data security lapses and problematic storage or disposal.

The announcement followed Malaysian customs officials’ report in June that more than 100 recently imported shipping containers contained e-scrap they said was illegally imported from the U.S. BAN had flagged the containers as likely containing end-of-life electronics, and it had called on the customs agency to inspect them.

In a statement, BAN Chief Operating Officer Hayley Palmer said the group has seen “a new wave of unscrupulous recyclers, waste managers and brokers that seek to use the developing world as their convenient dumping grounds in order to maximize profits at the expense of people and the planet.”

“Equally distressing is finding out how many respectable companies are willing to ignore their corporate responsibility and make use of such unethical service providers,” Palmer added.

The whistleblower portal allows employees at recycling firms or anyone else with knowledge of company practices to confidentially submit information.

“If you are witness to practices in your business or institution that are illegal or improper in the arena of waste management, including non-compliance with the law or with recycling certifications, we urge you to serve your conscience, human health and the environment by speaking out,” BAN states on the portal page.
The portal allows users to request various levels of confidentiality and to submit documents backing up their observations.

After BAN’s warning, the Malaysian government inspected more than 300 shipping containers and found that about one-third contained contraband e-scrap, officials said during a June 26 press conference in that country. Environment Minister Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad said 200 more containers remained to be inspected at the time.

BAN in August also alerted Thai and South African regulators to the possibility of illegal shipments containing toxic electric arc steel furnace dust collected from pollution control filters in Albania.

BAN, which administers the e-Stewards certification standard, has been raising awareness about international shipments of e-scrap and e-plastics for some time. The organization has even revoked e-Stewards certification for companies that are found to export e-scrap materials.

In January 2025, e-scrap shipments from the U.S. to most foreign countries could drop dramatically upon implementation of an amendment to the Basel Convention.

BAN Executive Director Jim Puckett said in a press release the group would work to see that the U.S. government takes the containers back and the exporters are held accountable. Although U.S. exporters are not bound by Basel regulations, in the U.S. the Department of Justice has previously brought federal charges, including fraud, against exporters depending on the circumstances. If an e-scrap company misrepresents to customers how collected material will be handled, that could constitute fraud, for example.

“The task of prosecuting the U.S. exporters is an important one, but difficult due to the fact that the U.S. is one of the very few countries in the world that has not ratified the Basel Convention,” the press release noted. “Nevertheless, BAN has been able to seek justice by working with the U.S. Department of Justice to charge U.S. recyclers that were trafficking e-wastes with fraud and other crimes.”

Mageswari Sangaralingam, secretary of Sahabat Alam Malaysia, said in BAN’s press release that “Malaysia is increasingly becoming a dumping ground for plastic and electronic wastes from rich countries like the U.S.”

“We applaud our enforcement agencies for working with NGOs nationally and internationally to end waste trafficking, and urge them to be vigilant against possible corruption,” Sangaralingam added. “The containers must not only be sent back but all companies and individuals trafficking or enabling illegal e-waste and plastic waste must be held accountable.”

Antoinette Smith contributed to this report.