Europe needs metals. Bacteria can get it from waste.
Your smartphone is precious, but more so than you might expect. It has gold and silver hidden in its circuit boards in addition to many other important metals like cobalt, lithium and copper.
You could collect about a gram of gold from 35 smartphones. The quality is the same as that dug from the ground. Still, humans throw away most of their used electronic devices and reach for a new one without thinking about it.
Worldwide, only about 17.4 per cent of e-waste is appropriately collected and recycled, according to The Global E-waste Monitor.
It’s not just about throwing away the bling, however. Europe is running low on metals. Renewable energy solutions require a long list of metals, many of which are not in Europe. The EU has listed 30 critically low metals.
There is another side to this coin too. The current industry processing minerals create a lot of polluting waste. If not properly recycled, the waste materials containing these valuable metals can also be toxic and leak harmful elements such as heavy metals and radionuclides into the environment.
