Home Courses Waste Management and Critical Raw Materials Course materials Lectures 2.4.1 Trade off: grade and recycling rate

2.4.1 Trade off: grade and recycling rate

Course subject(s) Module 2. Recycling

The amount of critical raw materials that can be recycled depend on the amount collected, the efficiency of pre-processing and the recycling process. The relationship of these factors on the recycling rate is further explained by Michael Johnson in this video.

Dr. Michael Johnson is a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of Limerick in Ireland. Michael has over 11 years of industrial experience and a B.Eng in Electronic Engineering, an M.Eng in Computer Systems and his PhD focused on autonomous robotics and distributed control. Current research interests include the reuse and recycling of electronics/WEEE, WEEE Management, Critical Raw Materials and Waste Management along with electronics repair and repurposing.

Main takeaways

  • Metals are valuable materials that can be recycled again and again without degrading their properties.
  • The quality or grade “G” of a metal is a measure of the purity of the product.
  • There is an inverse relationship or a trade-off between the quality of the material recovered and the amount of material required for the purification or metallurgical processes.
  • Even though they are inherently recyclable, the recycling rates and grades of metals nowadays are still discouragingly low.

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

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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/.
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