Home Courses Waste Management and Critical Raw Materials Course materials Lectures 2.4.2 Environmental issues

2.4.2 Environmental issues

Course subject(s) Module 2. Recycling

In the last five lessons we have seen how products that contain critical raw materials are recycled. Specifically metallurgy does have its environmental challenges. In this lesson Kamila Mascart explains how these challenges are met.

Main takeaways

  • Pyrometallurgy produces slag and off-gas containing dangerous substances which need to be treated.
  • Hydrometallurgy requires the use of large amounts of chemicals and produces large volumes of wastewater.
  • Environmental issues need to be identified locally but also following a life cycle perspective to identify potential pollution issues and resource consumption upstream and downstream the recycling process.

Some extra reading if you want to take this topic further:

Creative Commons License
Waste Management and Critical Raw Materials by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/waste-management-and-critical-raw-materials/.
Back to top