Something strange and almost hidden is growing on the Range. Animal, vegetable, or mineral you ask. Well, I generally write about animal and vegetable in this column. But this time it’s mineral. Sixty-two of them, to be precise. They are plentifully available in an overlooked form, and that source is growing at a rate of 3-5% each year. Technically, it’s referred to as WEEE, Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment. It includes computers, cell phones, batteries, washing machines, refrigerators, televisions, even vacuum cleaners and toys. For short, most refer to it as e-waste. And when it ends up in a landfill, much of it leaches toxic chemicals into municipal solid waste.
I had been inspired by a presentation by Dr. Roopali Phadke of Macalester College on recycling e-waste when Keith Steva and I had our first discussion about it. It was February 2022. Keith was going to run for office and I asked him to consider e-waste recycling as a job-creator. We decided to dive down the rabbit hole. Over the next few months, I dug up peer reviewed research on everything we could find about e-waste and Keith put the data into spreadsheets that helped us assess our data. In May I started talking with Maria Jensen of Repowered in St. Paul about how their e-waste recycling business worked. We eventually met in person in June to look at what Keith and I were digging up and analyzing. Maria offered Minnesota-based data about the type and quantities of e-waste that Repowered was handling and helped me and Keith to understand the limitations of what Minnesota is doing at the present. For example, there are no facilities in the U.S. that extract the final valuable metals like copper, nickel, iron, tin and aluminum. And there are no crushing facilities in Minnesota. Repowered sends demanufactured e-waste to be crushed in Wisconsin and it goes from there to Japan and Korea for final processing. To get the metals the U.S. economy needs, we must buy it back on the open market.
According to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Minnesota currently recycles only about 23% of our e-waste. According to the Global E-Waste Monitor, we in North America generate the equivalent of 46 pounds of e-waste per capita annually. For Minnesota, that’s 266 million pounds of e-waste each year. E-waste contains already-mined and infinitely recyclable metals that are growing in demand as we transition to a new energy economy. But most e-waste hides in our closets, our basements, attics, garages and storage units—a mountain of valuable materials untapped. Keith and Maria and I decided to try to project what that mountain of e-waste might mean in terms of needed metals and dollars as well as potential recycling jobs. Using Repowered data as an indicator of the “Minnesota mix” of e-waste, and about 125 peer reviewed studies on e-waste content, Keith was able to track and predict the quantities of 62 metals in our e-waste mix. Using market data on metals prices, he was able to place a value on the potential annual yield for those metals at full recycling capacity: $2.8 billion! We were on to something, we decided.
In the process of meeting regularly and clarifying the data we were finding, we discovered that Maria knew Roopali, whose original inspiration motivated my first call to Keith. Roopali joined us and we began researching how many jobs are involved in e-waste collection and processing. The Coalition for American Electronics Recycling Jobs report indicates that e-waste collection, demanufacturing, shredding and information technology asset collection/refurbishing activities generate one full time job for each 172,000 pounds of e-waste processed. Other studies on job creation allowed us to tweak that number and come up with a projection of 1,738 direct jobs generated to recycle Minnesota’s e-waste. That figure does not include the final extraction of valuable metals which we could repatriate to the United States for even more jobs.
That final extraction is happening overseas, mostly using smelting, the most common type of metal extraction process right now—also called pyrometallurgy. But there is a promising biohydrometallurgy technique that is far less environmentally harmful than smelting. Biological organisms (bacteria, archaea, and fungi) are used to convert metals to a soluble form and then recovered. There is currently one company that has patented this technique for gold extraction and a growing body of research on using biohydrometallurgy to recover other valuable metals. This has enormous potential for Minnesota. Of course, we will have to step up our collection and recycling infrastructure to harvest these valuable metals from all the e-waste we generate.
But it’s not impossible. Switzerland, with about the same population as Minnesota, collects and recycles 95% of its e-waste. In the European Union, where robust e-waste legislation has incentivized the collection and recycling of all kinds of e-waste, rates are not quite as high as Switzerland but they are growing. The U.S. lacks a consistent nationwide policy. Each state has their own laws and regulations, and few states have invested in the infrastructure to allow the full capture of e-waste’s potential. The Minnesota legislature will consider several bills which could use Extended Producer Responsibility policies to generate the funding necessary to step up our collection and processing potential.
So, there you have it. What’s growing on the Range is growing all over the state: e-waste. And we have the chance to be the place where it all goes to be transformed into that $2.8 billion of metals. Are you in? A summary of the study will be available on the Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability website this week at https://www.irpsmn.org/ewaste-recycling
