[gjmulhol]

One of the big questions is whether we can extract these minerals from existing devices that are out of use/have been disposed of. Ideally, that means that we are designing new devices with disassembly in mind. Everyone from Apple to Huawei is talking about doing this, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Some of the comments are slightly inaccurate. We actually don't know where all the deposits are, and there was just a large discovery of rare earth elements off the coast of Japan. Much rare earth extraction has been happening in China because of relatively lax environmental standards that have reached back decades, so the US, Australia, and many other countries with deposits can't compete due to the costs of labor and complying with environmental standards and regulations. Mountain pass is one of a few deposits in the US, and happens to be one of the larger ones that is sitting idle. There are lots of mines globally and could be more, but economically they need to be attractive.

Copper is another interesting element. It is exceedingly hard to extract from existing devices because it is buried inside the chips, boards, etc. You can recover about 25% of the copper in a device, or about 3% of the total mineral content of a device when you extract copper. Widespread copper mining has destroyed parts of the Atacama desert in Chile and is a really nasty process.

Finally, work has been going on for a long time to replace rare earth elements or dramatically reduce how much is used. In some cases, you need small amounts because you need those f-orbital electrons but you can get away with using creative coatings instead of large volumes of materials. In other cases, you can replace them by multi-layering other materials to approximate their performance. There are huge opportunities here, but we are a couple decades away from seeing any real sea change in what our devices are made of.

[pjc50]

> You can recover about 25% of the copper in a device

This is surprising to me, because it's all on the surface of the PCBs? Where does the other 75% "go"? I'd have thought if you incinerate the thing you'll get a puddle of gold-copper mix running out the bottom, and the rest of the rare elements and aluminium as oxides in the slag.

[Nasrudith]

It goes into things that are uneconomical to extract without vastly different conditions. Technically one could breakdown and separate everything by element and isotope but that would be an incredibly inefficient way of doing so.