The main components of smart phones are precious metals and rare earth materials. An iPhone will probably consume 0.034g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and less than 0.001g of platinum. In addition to the precious metal, it also includes 25g of aluminum and about 15g of copper.
This is only a small part. There are also a series of rare earth elements in the smartphone, including lanthanum, cerium, lanthanum, cerium, lanthanum and cerium. Although these rare earth elements are widely contained in the earth's crust, it is very difficult to economically and efficiently extract and extract. Of course, in addition to these materials, there are plastics, glass, batteries and a series of ingredient forms in the smartphone.
Although the amount of these materials is small in every mobile phone, there are now 2 billion people worldwide who own smartphones, and this number is still rising. In addition, the concentration of some elements in the smartphone, such as gold and silver, is much higher than the concentration in the same weight of ore. One ton of iPhone extracts 300 times more gold than a ton of gold ore, and the extracted silver is 6.5 times that of a ton of silver ore.
What does the elimination of smart machines mean for these resources?
According to statistics, 2 billion smartphone users update their old models on average every 11 months, which means that old phones that are eliminated will be thrown into a corner of the drawer and then forgotten, or directly Was lost. Less than 10% of the old phones will be recycled, and the precious metals will be extracted and reused. Looking at the resource content of a mobile phone alone, you may not feel that there is anything, but when the number of eliminated mobile phones forms a scale, the resources contained therein are considerable. One million mobile phones can provide 16 tons of copper, 350kg of silver, 34kg of gold and 15kg of palladium.
The challenge of recycling and using these precious metals is how to safely and economically handle these elements and materials. A large part of e-waste (including mobile phones) will be exported or discarded in some developing countries, such as China. Foreign media have in-depth coverage of some villages and towns in China. For example, Guiyu Town in the southeast is known as the world's largest electronic waste disposal site. Village residents have long relied on recycling gold on the circuit board. The main process involves the breaking of circuit boards. Polluted behavior such as cracking, high corrosive acid separation, 81.8% of children under the age of 6 in the town suffer from lead poisoning, and those high corrosive acids flow into nearby rivers and cause “hundred years of hardship†pollution.
Even if you don't arbitrarily discard these garbage, it is not a simple matter to recycle them in the place where they are generated. In Australia, for example, the industrial smelting involved in recycling e-waste requires high costs and is not environmentally friendly.
Is there a better solution?
Of course there are. The ideal situation is that we slow down the speed of mobile phone replacement, but changing people's spending habits may be the least feasible way.
The materials scientist at the University of New South Wales, Veena Sahajwalla, is working to solve this tough problem. Sahajwalla believes that in each community in the future, there should be a “micro-factory†that can safely and efficiently dispose of used mobile phones, which can extract precious metals from old mobile phones and incinerate the remaining materials. This approach eliminates the need for people to come into contact with hazardous materials inside the smartphone.
The mobile phone will be crushed by the high-voltage current, and then the robot arm will take out the circuit board. (If a mobile phone is disassembled and sold as e-waste, it can sell for up to 2.21 yuan, of which the most valuable circuit board is about 1.95 yuan, which is still a small screen. The price of a straight-line mobile phone, which is now popular on the market, can be sold at 2.08 yuan) and sent to a small incinerator to extract valuable metal alloys through precisely controlled high-temperature reactions. Any toxic or unwanted material can be incinerated in subsequent processing. The size of the complete unit is approximately one centralized box size. From then on, people can take the precious metals they need directly in such devices, rather than looking for hard work in the e-waste that has piled up into mountains.
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