{"id":65712,"date":"2021-05-14T03:00:46","date_gmt":"2021-05-14T07:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=65712"},"modified":"2021-05-13T18:58:58","modified_gmt":"2021-05-13T22:58:58","slug":"recycling-when-it-makes-economic-sense-good-recycling-just-because-not-good-at-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2021\/05\/14\/recycling-when-it-makes-economic-sense-good-recycling-just-because-not-good-at-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Recycling when it makes economic sense? Good. Recycling just because? Not good at all."},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Worstall<\/a> explains why a new push to mandate recycling rare earth from consumer electronic devices will be a really, really bad idea … so bad that it’ll waste more resources than are recovered by the recycling effort:<\/p>\n

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[Indium is] the thing that makes touchscreens work. Lovely stuff. Normally extracted as a byproduct of getting zinc from spharelite. Usual concentrations in the original mineral are 45 to 500 parts per million.<\/p>\n

Now, note something important about a by product material like this. If we recycle indium we don’t in fact save any indium from spharelite. Because we mine spharelite for the zinc, the indium is just a bonus when we do. So, we recycle the indium we’re already using. We don’t process out the indium in our spharelite. We just take the same amount of zinc we always did and dump what we don’t want into the gangue, the waste.<\/p>\n

So, note what’s happened. We recycle indium and yet we dig up exactly the same amount of indium we always did. We just don’t use what we’ve dug up \u2013 we’re not in fact saving that vital resource of indium at all.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n