How many mobile phones did you have? Given that on average, people update their smartphone every 11 months, many of us will not be able to answer this question on the fly without looking into the past. The next question will be even harder: what happened to your old phones? Perhaps we would take care of them better if we knew how valuable all these smartphones, tablets and computers are. In fact, this is a real goldmine. The scientist of Vina Sahadzhvalla wants to create miniature furnaces that will extract wealth from the depths of spent smartphones.
Wines is director of the Center for Research and Technology for Sustainable Materials at the University of New South Wales.
“How do we get to the fact that every society and city will collect electronic devices and turn them into valuable materials?”, Asks Sahajvall. “If everyone needs to do this, it’s hard to imagine big melting furnaces - we need decentralized and distributed production, where we will have all the resources and processes in our hands.”
Its solution involves rethinking one of the pillars of modern industry - the plant. Instead of rebuilding modern gigantic objects, spewing smog somewhere in the middle of the forest, Sahadzhvalla defends the idea of micro-factories: recycling and recycling systems that are small enough and efficient enough to be placed in every area of the city around the globe. Micro factories will allow not only to process electronic waste literally on site, but also to create something new on the basis of the resources received.
Electronic waste contains metals like gold, iron, silver, copper, platinum and palladium, as well as rare earth elements: yttrium, lanthanum, terbium, neodymium, gadolinium and praseodymium; not to mention plastic and glass. And although the quantities of all these elements in the phone are small - 0.034 grams of gold, for example - they grow rapidly when you realize that 42 million tons of electronic waste accumulated in 2014 alone, and this number will grow by 3-5% annually.
Currently, most of this waste is shipped around the world and delivered to recycling sites like Guiyu in southeastern China - alas, one of the most polluted places on Earth - because the industrial world has not yet come up with a way to efficiently and economically expediently separate tiny pieces, of which electronics is composed.
Sahadzhvalli microfactory should change this. “Micro-processing is a new scientific paradigm,” she says. “Traditional processing works at the macro level, but we have to go to the micro when, for example, we are dealing with a mixture of copper, nickel and zinc.”
According to Sahajvalli, more precisely according to her plan, the pre-programmed automatic drones will crawl through a pile of broken electronic waste and choose the right one, like printed circuit boards. These boards will then be placed in a small oven that will use selected temperatures to extract valuable resources like copper alloy. Glass and plastic can be combined at high temperatures to produce silicon carbide nanoparticles that have a variety of industrial applications.
This approach also solves the problem of extracting rare-earth elements, which have such a name, not because they are difficult to find - in fact, there are quite a lot of them - but because they are damn difficult to extract. In e-waste, in particular, hard drives, rare earth elements are often combined with iron, which presents almost insurmountable problems for recycling. But again, the Sahadzhvalli micro-furnace can extract rare-earth oxides, and with them iron drops. Even CDs are recycled into more useful components.
Sahadzhvalla also wants to make the energy costs of the furnace functioning as efficient as possible. “If we could combine renewable energy and solar energy with these materials, then we would really be independent,” she says.
Avoiding energy-intensive transportation of waste around the world, Sahajvalli microfabrials also embody decentralized distributed production.
“Jobs are being created where everyone can participate in creating local resources,” she says. Micro factories will not only allow the creation of completely new small enterprises, using the output of resources from microfibrids, but also give existing small enterprises the opportunity to dig a new niche for themselves.
“Small and medium-sized enterprises, as a rule, crave for innovative solutions, and we have received a good response from different groups in the manufacturing sector.”
E-waste is estimated to contain $ 52 billion in resources, many of which are harder to extract from the earth than e-waste. We are losing a lot of energy and resources for finding and developing resources in familiar places, when they literally lie in our hands.
The article is based on materials .
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