When agendas align: Critical materials and green electronics

Abstract

Modern electronic devices are constructed using a large palette of materials, some of which are considered "critical," meaning that their supply-chains are tenuous to some degree and they cannot easily be substituted. The rare earth crisis of 2010-'11 brought worldwide attention to the challenge of dealing with critical materials, and resulted in several research programs being created, world wide, to find technological solutions to shortages of essential materials. Some of the approaches used to ensure the supply chains of critical materials are consistent with making electronics greener, some are neutral, and some can run counter to the greening of information devices. Some of the approaches applied to critical materials can also be applied to anacritical materials which are the opposite of critical materials in a particular sense: they are materials that need to be removed from production or eliminated from waste because they are oversupplied or have undesirable traits such as toxicity or contamination of recycle streams. We describe where critical materials strategies and greening strategies coincide, and evaluate the most significant roadblocks to success. KeywordsGreen products, Recycling, Consumer electronics, Production, Neodymium, Magnetic separation, Industries AbstractModern electronic devices are constructed using a large palette of materials, some of which are considered "critical," meaning that their supply-chains are tenuous to some degree and they cannot easily be substituted. The rare earth crisis of 2010-'11 brought worldwide attention to the challenge of dealing with critical materials, and resulted in several research programs being created, world wide, to find technological solutions to shortages of essential materials. Some of the approaches used to ensure the supply chains of critical materials are consistent with making electronics greener, some are neutral, and some can run counter to the greening of information devices. Some of the approaches applied to critical materials can also be applied to anacritical materials which are the opposite of critical materials in a particular sense: they are materials that need to be removed from production or eliminated from waste because they are oversupplied or have undesirable traits such as toxicity or contamination of recycle streams. We describe where critical materials strategies and greening strategies coincide, and evaluate the most significant roadblocks to success.

Sustainability of Permanent Rare Earth Magnet Motors in (H)EV Industry

“…For instance, if the sociopolitical assessment concludes a need for material substitution in order to combat monopolies and criticality, then this approach is not necessarily a sustainable solution for the environment. Alexander King in a conference paper states this is because increased mining may ''increase environmental impacts and spread them to new locations,'' and the development of a new magnetic material will threaten the research which is going into putting a recycling solution in place [66]. The right conclusion is clearly not to write off the concept of EVs or PM motors for that matter.…”

“…The disadvantages of this are the reduction in the energy density and the exorbitant price of dysprosium [65]. While substituting REEs for other materials or even removing them completely could be seen as a possible sustainable solution, the development of a new type of motor or magnetic material may increase mining of new materials which in turn could increase environmental impacts [66] (Fig. 5).…”

Assessment and Exploitation of the Inherent Value of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) for Circular Economy

“…over half of the world's cobalt is supplied from DRC. [58][59][60] which means that use of these metals in EEE results in considerable depletion of finite CRM reserves. This is a problem not only for economies that rely on continued supply of CRMs, but also for humanity's ability to deploy existing and emerging green technologies which are vital to strategies for achieving sustainability with our planet.…”

“…[200][201][202][203][204] In an attempt to enable cost-effective isolation of the magnets from HDDs, the US Critical Materials Institute has developed a robot capable of 'punching' the magnets from drives with high throughput. 58 Both processes allow magnetic materials to be isolated from HDDs whilst avoiding the major barrier represented by high cost of manual isolation of magnets from drives. Numerous other processes have been investigated for recovery of REMs from isolated NIB magnets as reviewed by Yang et al, 2017.…”