Heaps of discarded computers, telephones and TV sets are disassembled into parts, then sorted through and picked to pieces to retrieve precious metals and rare earth metals. At four “environmental industrial parks” in Kaohsiung, Taoyuan, Tainan and Hualien, the nation’s leading recyclers literally turn tonnes of disused electronics into gold every day, creating a booming industry with an annual worth of NT$15 billion (US$448.8 million).
Informal recycling is part of an “urban mining” initiative that the Environmental Protection Administration has been promoting, as reprocessing e-waste reduces garbage volume and recovers valuable metals and rare earth metals, which are important for a nation with continuously dwindling landfill capacity and even fewer mining resources.
“Taiwan has no mining resources in the traditional sense, but a new type of mine has emerged… Disused electronic products and demolished buildings are ‘mines,’ because there is gold and copper in motherboards and steel, lead and copper in pipelines and reinforcing bars. Mines deep in the wild have already been moved to cities,” administration Minister Wei Kuo-yen (魏國彥) wrote in a column last year in advocacy of urban mining.
Artificial mines made of e-waste could be more valuable than natural mines, as 180g to 460g of gold can be retrieved from a tonne of disused cellphones, compared with high-grade gold mines that at best yield 8g to 10g of gold per tonne excavated.
Taiwan creates 40,000 tonnes of e-waste every year, 40 percent of which are recycled, and the nation extracts about 1 tonne of gold and millions of tonnes of copper from electronic scrap every year, according to the administration.
“From a strategic perspective, urban mining gives us access to rare earth metals, the export of which has come under stricter control in China,” Department of Waste Management Director Wu Sheng-chung (吳盛忠) said.
However, the agency’s advocacy of urban mining has prompted protests from environmentalists, who fear the development of the recycling industry and an increased supply of e-waste could recreate serious pollution problems seen in Tainan’s Erjen River (二仁溪), one of the world’s largest e-waste and scrap metal recycling centers in the 1970s.
“We are worried that Taiwan will return to the old days, when e-waste was recycled through substandard and often illegal methods, which caused pollution in the Erjen River that still has not been completely remedied, even with a NT$4.2 billion government program,” Tainan Community University Research and Development Association director Huang Huan-chang (黃煥彰) said.
Advocacy of urban mining has been linked to the rumored lifting of a ban on the import of scrap metals, enacted in 1991, in relation to a cross-strait trade in goods agreement being negotiated to establish a supply of e-waste for Taiwan’s recycling industry.
“Taiwan cannot afford to become a hazardous waste treatment center for other nations again, and the recycling industry will not necessarily be making money, as its profits depend on metal prices, which are extremely volatile. Taiwan could end up treating other nations’ garbage while losing money,” he said.
After valuable materials are retrieved from e-waste, residue such as substrate materials and waste solution must be incinerated or placed in a landfill, which could lead to toxic metal leaks and the emission of dioxins into the air, Huang said, adding that Taiwan has a landfill capacity of only two to three years, which can barely absorb domestic waste, let alone imported e-waste and scrap metals.
Meanwhile, urban mining advocacy has also been linked to a three-year-old administration proposal to remove 12 kinds of e-waste — including discarded PCs, appliances, batteries and wires — and scrap metals from a list of hazardous industrial waste, leaving environmentalists concerned about the consequences of treating waste as a resource.
For example, the illegal dumping of slag has become rampant since slag, originally classified as industrial waste, was redefined as a product to encourage it being reused as a construction material, which has allowed manufacturers to sell slag to reprocessors instead of properly and legally disposing of it as industrial waste, Huang said.
“The administration’s priority should be ensuring all hazardous waste is processed through the legal takeback system instead of coming up with a scheme that deals significant damage to public health and the environment,” he said.
In response, Wu told the Taipei Times that the administration is not considering lifting the import ban on scrap metals or recategorizing e-waste until a public consensus has been formed, adding that the latest, most advanced recycling technology is not even remotely related to “backyard recycling.”
World-class recyclers such as Kaohsiung-based Solar Applied Material Technology Corp and Taoyuan-based Super Dragon Co have come very close to the goal of zero liquid discharges and zero landfills through state-of-the-art recycling technology, Wu said, adding that they are capable of handling all of the nation’s e-waste and more, so treatment of e-waste residue and the creation of more landfills will soon not be an issue.
Traditionally, metals used in information technology equipment were recovered by dissolving substrates with highly acidic and toxic solutions, which produced harmful compounds such as dioxins, while illegal dumping of waste solutions and residue created health and environmental effects, he added.
However, such methods are “a thing of the past,” because the latest metal retrieval technology uses nonpoisonous metal stripping solutions to remove only desired metals without chemically affecting substrates, Wu said, adding that recovered metals can then be turned into raw materials or, preferably, into various metal compounds so that they can be returned to the manufacturing process that created them.
Waste solutions can also be recycled and remade into desired chemical compounds, which can then be reincorporated into the manufacturing process to create a circular economy, Wu said.
Meanwhile, substrates, instead of being incinerated or sent to landfills, can be shredded and remade into construction materials to help fulfill the nation’s high demand for gravel, as Taiwan imports more than 10 million tonnes of gravel every year, he said.
The global trend in recycling is to convert e-waste into metals and chemicals, biological waste into fuel and energy and inorganic waste into building materials, Wu said, adding that while Taiwan has the means to accomplish all of those goals, it lacks the will.
“Taiwan is a technological nation and we have the ability to realize the goal of zero liquid discharge and zero landfill recycling. It is true that illegal practices have hurt the public’s confidence in the industry, but we must not be frightened to do the right thing,” he said.
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