Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Modern society is highly dependent on metals for infrastructure and technology, and consequently our quality of life. However, as they are non-renewable resource, and there has been an unprecedented extraction of these metals from the earth, especially during the last two centuries, has raised concerns regarding their long-term availability to meet the demand of future generations. Of particular concern is the geopolitical supply risk of metals, which involves political stability and governance level of resource producing countries, and a country’s control of the global supply of a resource, giving them strategic market advantages. The recent issue of the supply disruption of rare earth elements is one such case. All these factors have placed increasing emphasis on enhanced resource recovery from accumulated societal stocks of products reaching their end-of-life stage – commonly referred to as urban mines. Electronic waste (e-waste) is a rapidly growing urban mine and is seen as an important source of valuable resources such as precious and critical metals (critical because they are prone to high supply risk and are required for a particular system such as a technology, company, country, region, or even globally). However, resource recovery from e-waste is fraught with technical, environmental, and economic challenges due to material and structural complexity of modern electronic goods.
This research program is aimed at establishing improved resource recovery routes from e-waste in Canada by: 1) estimating current and future amount of e-waste generation through development of a comprehensive database of historical sales of electronic goods and their accumulated societal stocks per person in Canada; 2) analyzing metal composition of a sample of e-waste products to estimate theoretical maximum recovery potential of different metals from current and future e-waste streams; 3) assessing efficiency of overall e-waste treatment systems by determining the difference between theoretical recovery potential and actual recovery rate of different metals from e-waste; and 4) testing a combination of different manual and technological e-waste handling systems to compare the actual resource recovery rate in different systems. The research will help identify the best performing system, leading to establishment of improved resource recovery routes from e-waste, which could reduce Canadian dependency on foreign imports and result in lower risk of supply disruptions and the associated implications for society.