While Taiwan’s news media mostly consist of reports on domestic politics, the Taipei Times and its sister paper, the Chinese-language Liberty Times, deserve credit for the nearly half-page reports that they published on Monday and Sunday respectively concerning cellphone recycling and the extraction of rare earth metals from them.
In 2013, I was invited to attend a conference on “Materials in a resource-constrained world” in the Netherlands. At least 70 percent of the lectures at the conference revolved around mobile phone recycling, rare earth metals and urban mining. Urban mining is retrieving useful metals from used products and cellphone recycling is doubtless an extremely important part of this.
The importance of urban mining extends beyond environmental and economic issues. It include considerations of national security.
In 2011, the European Commission published a list of 14 raw materials that it defined as critical, mainly because they are mostly mined in a small number of non-EU countries from which EU member states have to import them.
The original list of 14 raw materials, called the “EU critical 14,” are: antimony, beryllium, cobalt, fluorspar, gallium, germanium, natural graphite, indium, magnesium, niobium, the platinum group metals, rare earth elements, tantalum and tungsten. This list has since been adjusted and expanded to include more than 20 substances.
An important aspect of recycling mobile phones and other devices is to reduce the use and importation of these and other critical raw materials to avoid being controlled by suppliers.
The Taipei Times and Liberty Times reports cited data from Germany’s Oeko-Institut — or Institute for Applied Ecology — and the Japanese Ministry of the Environment.
These institutions have both carried out in-depth research on the issue of sustainable use of resources, so the reports deserve credit for citing such reliable sources. However, a little more care should be applied regarding the uses of certain terms.
“Rare metals” is a general term for metallic elements that occur in low concentrations, are hard to extract and are used in relatively small quantities. Although the elements categorized as rare metals might vary from place to place, gold, silver and tin are not included in the category. Therefore, silver and gold comprise an important part of the value of extracting metals from old cellphones, in addition to that derived from rare metals.
Chen Sinn-wen is a chair professor and senior vice president at National Tsing Hua University.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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