Recycling Precious Metals from Mobile Phones

Sergio Aquino

M.B.A., University of Rochester, 2000

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT OF

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF APPLIED SCIENCE

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

(Mining Engineering)

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

(Vancouver)

December 2017

Abstract

The world population reached 7.5 billion inhabitants in April 2017. The number of mobile phones will reach 4.77 billion by the end of this year. Mobile phones are made of more than 50 elements. Discoveries of economically viable gold mines in the main producing countries have been slowing down significantly since the 1800s. The global surface temperature of the planet is warming at 0.170C per decade relative to pre-industrial levels.

The mobile phone was chosen for this thesis because it is a comprehensive unit of hazardous waste and e-waste. Mobile phones are a municipal solid waste and public health concern. The low energy and low barrier to entry recycling business this thesis envisions recycles precious metals from end of life mobile phones close to where the devices are discarded.

This thesis uses system dynamics to model the exponential adoption of mobile phones and its impact in mining and CO2e emissions. The model is the basis to calculate the return of new precious metal recycling businesses.

Climate change is one of the hardest problem men has ever faced because it requires many countries to work together to establish climate centric governance and policies. Businesses are reviewing their supply chain and energy sources.

This work focuses on disruptive low energy and low barrier to entry technologies to recycle precious metals from mobile phones. Local recycling businesses will create jobs and stimulate the economy in B.C., Canada, and the world.

Lay Summary

Mobile phones are manufactured with more than 50 chemical elements including gold and silver.

Recycling companies collect devices reaching their end of life in Canada.

Only a small number of smelters overseas can recover precious metals from mobile phones.

Mining from e-waste is more economical and less energy and resource intensive than conventional mining.

This research focuses on low barrier to entry technologies to recover precious metals in Canada that minimizes the emission of CO2e during the recycling process.

This thesis uses concepts from climate change; municipal solid waste management; public health; history; economics; environmental legislation; international relations; logistics; mining, environmental, metallurgical, and civil engineering; molecular biology; synthetic biology; and biotechnology to lay the foundation of this new technology.

This thesis models the adoption of mobile phones in B.C. and its impact in mining and CO2e emissions. This low barrier to entry technology can be applied in other provinces and countries.

iii

Preface

This dissertation is the original, unpublished work of the author, Sergio Aquino. All research, literature review, data collection, data analysis, system dynamics modeling, conclusions, and suggestions are the independent work of the author.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Lay Summary ...... iii Preface ...... iv Table of Contents ...... v List of Tables ...... vi List of Figures ...... vii List of Abbreviations and Units ...... viii Glossary ...... x Acknowledgements ...... xi Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Purpose of the Research ...... 6 1.2 Research Questions and Objectives ...... 9 1.3 Thesis Outline ...... 10 Chapter 2. Background and Context ...... 13 2.1 Acting on Climate Change ...... 17 2.2 Mobile Phones ...... 21 2.3 E-Waste ...... 30 2.4 Public Health ...... 35 Chapter 3. Literature Review ...... 41 3.1 Legislation ...... 44 3.2 Smelters ...... 48 3.3 Biocyanidation ...... 53 3.3.1 Characteristics ...... 55 3.3.2 Experiments ...... 59 Chapter 4. A System Dynamics Model ...... 64 Chapter 5. Conclusion ...... 79 Chapter 6. Recommendations and Future Work ...... 81 6.1 Recommendations ...... 82 6.2 Future Work ...... 83 References ...... 85 Appendix ...... 100

List of Tables

TABLE 1 - SELECTED MATERIALS IN MOBILE PHONES (POLÁK & DRÁPALOVÁ, 2012) ...... 24 TABLE 2 - THE COMPONENTS OF AN IPHONE (PACIFIC MUSEUM OF EARTH, UBC) ...... 25 TABLE 3 - GLOBAL MOBILE PHONE MARKET SHARE ...... 28 TABLE 4 - IMPORTANT BIOLEACHING FACTORS (WILLNER & FORNALCZYK, 2013; LIU ET AL., 2016) ...... 58 TABLE 5 - B.C. POPULATION - ACTUAL AND PROJECTION (B.C. GOVERNMENT, 2017) ...... 67 TABLE 6 - ASSUMPTIONS USED IN THE SYSTEM DYNAMICS MODEL ...... 68 TABLE 7 – SELECTED VARIABLES FROM SYSTEM DYNAMIC MODEL ...... 69

List of Figures

FIGURE 1 – RECYCLING MODEL FOR MOBILE PHONES (ADAPTED FROM POLÁK & DRÁPALOVÁ, 2012) ...... 2 FIGURE 2 - RECYCLING PRECIOUS METALS FROM MOBILE PHONES IN CANADA: POPULATION HEAT MAP AND MOBILE PHONE FLOW TO SMELTERS IN BELGIUM AND CA, USA ...... 5 FIGURE 3 - EVOLUTION OF THE MOBILE PHONE (UNEP, 2009B) ...... 22 FIGURE 4 – GLOBAL MOBILE PHONE SUSCRIPTIONS (CWTA, 2016) (ITU, 2017) ...... 23 FIGURE 5 - AVERAGE GOLD ORE GRADE FROM 1830 TO 2010 ...... 26 FIGURE 6 - CHANGE IN ANNUAL GOLD DEMAND, 2016 VS. 2015 ...... 29 FIGURE 7 – TECHNOLOGY DEMAND FOR GOLD, 2016 VS. 2015 ...... 29 FIGURE 8 - RECYCLING PRECIOUS METALS FROM MOBILE PHONES SYSTEM DYNAMICS MODEL ...... 66 FIGURE 9 - B.C. MOBILE PHONE RECYCLING MODEL OUTPUT ...... 75

vii

List of Abbreviations and Units

AAS Atomic absorption spectrometer

B.C. British Columbia

C&D Construction and demolition

CFC Chlorofluorocarbon. Organic compound that contains only carbon, chlorine, and fluorine used in soft drinks, propellants in aerosol applications, and propane. Contributes to ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere that has been phased out under the Montreal Protocol in 1987.

CO2e Carbon dioxide equivalent

CWTA Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association

ELSI Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications

EOL End of life

EPR Extended product responsibility

ESM Electronic scrap material

EV Electric vehicle

GHG Greenhouse gases

FTE Full time equivalent

IC&I Industrial, commercial and institutional

LCM Lifecycle management

Mg Milligram

MJ Mega joule

MSW Municipal solid waste

NGO Non-governmental organization

PCB Printed circuit board

viii

RMC Recycle My Cell

SCOR Supply Chain Operations Reference model

SDG Sustainable Development Goals

SD System Dynamics

R&D Research and development

TEM Transmission electron microscopy

Tonne Metric tonne

UNEP United Nations Environmental Programme

UBC University of British Columbia

U.S. United States of America

WBG World Bank Group

WEEE Waste electrical and electronic equipment

Glossary

Bacteria Unicellular (prokaryotic) microorganism that lacks a nucleus membrane.

Chronic disease Persistent disease that lasts for more than 3 months.

Gram-negative Bacteria that does not retain the crystal violet stain as opposed to their gram-positive counterparts. This means their cell envelope is different than gram-positives. They cause more diseases.

Mesophilic Microorganisms that is best at mild temperatures.

Non-pathogenic Microorganisms that do not cause diseases.

Proteobacterium Largest and diverse (5 subgroups) group of prokaryote that rivals gram-positive bacteria.

PCR Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a technology used by molecular biologists to copy a DNA molecule or a specific part of a DNA molecule. PCR is executed by placing in a single test tube with DNA mixed with a set of reagents and placing the test tube in a thermal cycler, an equipment that cycles through a pre- determined series of temperatures for many cycles. The result is a purified sample of the gene that can be studied in detail.

Polypeptone Mixed of peptones that meets nutritious requirements of various bacteria, fungi, and mammalian cells.

Septicemia Serious infection of the blood caused by bacteria. Also known as bacteremia. Bacteria and toxins can reach various parts of the body via bloodstream.

Urban cluster a cluster of contiguous grid cells of 1 km2 with a density of at least 300 inhabitants per km2 and a minimum population of 5 000.

Acknowledgements

I recognize my supervisor, Scott Dunbar, for the academic advice, encouragement, and direction

I received during my Master of Applied Science degree and thesis project. He gave me valuable insight in academic writing and shared his experience in biotechnology. I would also like to thank my secondary supervisor Dirk van Zyl for his real-life examples and overall suggestions to my project. There were delays along the way, but you understood my initiative to take twice the required courses and assured me that my research was relevant not only for engineering, but to urbanism, public health, biotechnology, and economics.

I acknowledge the flexible MASc program offered at the University of British Columbia. In addition to Mining Engineering, I attended classes at the School of Population and Public Health, the School of Community and Regional Planning, Civil Engineering, and the School of

Architecture and Landscape Architecture. UBC events are valuable and I highlight the talks at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and the seminars at the Centre for Blood Research.

I recognize the quality of UBC museums.

I thank the staff at the Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering and extend this acknowledgment to the UBC staff for their dedication and flexibility.

I recognize the universities, professors, and staff behind edX, Coursera, and Futurelearn for offering valuable, timely, and inspiring courses.

Chapter 1. Introduction

A mobile phone, also known as cellular phone or cellphone, is a device that sends and receives radio signals carrying the human voice communicating with another individual using a mobile phone or a landline. Mobile phones are the primary form of communication in areas of the world where no wired communication infrastructure exists (UNEP, 2012). The mobile phone was chosen for this thesis because it is a unit of hazardous waste (ScienceDaily, 2007), e-waste, and a growing municipal solid waste and public health concerns.

Mobile phones are composed of 40% of plastics, 32% of non-ferrous metals, 20% of glass and ceramics, 3% of ferrous metals, and 5% of other materials. Mobile phones and other small e- waste represent 10% of the 50 million tonnes of WEEE collected yearly due to their reduced weight and size (Mobile Phone Working Group, 2008). Canada and other countries have extended product responsibility (EPR) laws and policies that manage the life cycle of mobile phones, batteries, and other e-waste.

Mobile phones are a global health problem when exported with other e-waste to developing countries where the devices are manually burnt to extract metals. Mobile phones are a waste management problem when they reach landfills and leak toxic substances. Cadmium from one mobile phone battery is sufficient to pollute 600,000 liters of water (Polák & Drápalová, 2012).

The NGO Californians Against Waste estimates that 70% of the toxic heavy metals in landfills comes from e-waste (Gui et al, 2013).

The recycling model of mobile phones and e-waste is illustrated in figure 1. Mobile phone manufacturers procure elements from metal suppliers and mining companies. Mobile phone manufacturers ship mobile phones to operators and resellers overseas. The consumer purchases a mobile phone and activates it with an operator. After using the phone for a period of time, the consumer opts between keeping the mobile phone in a drawer, reselling it, giving it away, throwing it in the garbage, or recycling it. The mobile phone may have many users, but it reaches its end of life (EOL) on average at the end of 8 years from the time of mobile phone is activated to the moment it is discard at a recycling bin or garbage (Polák & Drápalová, 2012).

Figure 1 – Recycling Model for Mobile Phones (Adapted from Polák & Drápalová,

2012)

The benefits of recycling mobile phones include: extending the life of the devices when they are repaired for further use, recovering metals to be reused in the production of new phones, reducing the fossil fuels burned and greenhouse gases (GHG) released in the atmosphere during mining for elements, stopping toxic substances from getting to the soil when mobile phones are discarded in landfills, preventing toxins from becoming airborne in open-air incinerators, lowering the shipment of mobile phones and other waste electric and electronic equipment

(WEEE) to Eastern Canada and smelters overseas.

A mobile phone recycling business erases personal content, sends batteries to the proper recycling center, separates the plastic components to be recycled at another facility, shreds the remaining parts, extracts precious metals from printed circuit boards (PCB) and other electronic scrap material, and discards the remaining material in the local landfill.

In order to increase the mobile phone recycling rate in the province of British Columbia (B.C.), the government could create a $45 environmental handling fee from consumers at the time mobile phones are purchased. This would be a good incentive for the mobile phone user to return their phone at a recycling depot and recover the fee after the device reaches its EOL.

The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) whose members include wireless service providers, mobile phone manufacturers, and recyclers has 550 drop-off points in

B.C. (CWTA, 2009). The EOL mobile phones gathered in the various provinces are shipped to recyclers in Ontario and Quebec according to the EPR design. 50% of British Columbians are

3 aware of recycling programs in general, but only 16% know Recycle My Cell (Q. C. Group,

2013). The numbers show that there are too many mobile phones that are not being recycled.

It is estimated that only about one-quarter of the metals discarded in the form of mobile phones end up being recycled. Unfortunately, a significant portion ends up in landfills (Graedel, 2011).

Mining metals is a very energy intensive activity and recycling precious metals reduces CO2e, a notation describing greenhouse gases (GHG) in a common unit. Low barrier to entry technologies represent an improvement in CO2e as mobile phones will not need to be transported to e-waste recyclers across Canada and smelters overseas.

Large scale metal recycling is an oligopoly dominated by a few smelters around the world.

Mobile phones travel long distances to their final destination. Smelters like Umicore in Belgium process and recover 20 different elements (Umicore, 2016). A low barrier to entry technology will provide a low energy alternative to recycling precious metals in Canada and the world.

Electronic devices increase our wellbeing and productivity. The consumer will continue to consume and dispose growing quantities of e-waste. Manufacturers will continue to expand the use of chemical elements in electronic devices to increase their functionality. Linear patterns of using natural resources based on take, make, use, and discard are not sustainable anymore today and less energy intensive recycling alternatives are needed.

The low barrier to entry precious metals recycling technology this thesis envisions is a bioreactor that recycles crushed electronic waste and recovers precious metals such as gold, silver,

4 platinum, palladium, and other elements. The proposed low barrier to entry technologies will allow precious metals and gold specifically to be recycled from mobile phones close to where the devices are consumed, used, and discarded.

This thesis studies the recycling of mobile phones in British Columbia (see appendix A for B.C. map and population heat map) as a framework of e-waste recycling that can be extended to

Canada and the world. It reviews and promotes low barrier to entry technologies to extract precious metals from mobile phones in Canada in order to incrementally decrease the flow of

EOL mobile phones or e-waste to recyclers to Quebec and Ontario and, from there, to smelters overseas: mainly U.S. (San Jose) and Belgium (Antwerp).

Figure 2 - Recycling Precious Metals from Mobile Phones in Canada: Population

Heat Map and Mobile Phone Flow to Smelters in Belgium and CA, USA

1.1 Purpose of the Research

This work models the future impact of low barrier to entry precious metals recycling technologies in B.C. These technologies help reduce CO2e from the atmosphere, contribute to 4 sustainable development goals, and allow the province to extract and keep the precious metals from mobile phones and other types of e-waste. The short-term focus is to extract gold from mobile phones, but the end goal is to extract the most number of elements possible from WEEE.

The thesis recommends the investment in low barrier to entry recycling technologies that will benefit the world. This work anticipates mobile phone users will use recycling businesses in urban clusters, as they will trust them. The end of life of mobile phones will decrease from the current 8 years and, as a result, the number of mobile phones to be recycled will increase. Today, users store devices in their houses for long periods of time afraid that their information may be compromised. A better recycling system can shorten the current EOL.

This thesis contributes to 4 sustainable development goals. See appendix B for a list of SDGs

(U.N., 2015):

SDG 6 advocates for drinking water security for all. Access to water for all is a 2030 goal that will be achieved by reducing pollution and minimizing the escape of hazardous chemicals in the water (UNIDO, 2015). Mobile phones and their batteries are a risk to watersheds.

SDG 11 envisions better urbanization with industrialization and cities with better infrastructure

(UNIDO, 2015). MSW accumulates in cities as they became more affluent as per appendix C.

WEEE is an example of disposal that is hard to be recycle. E-waste should not reach landfills contaminating soil and water. Low barrier to entry recycling technologies can contribute to more sustainable urban areas.

SDG 12 wants sustainable consumption and production with low environmental footprint. A closer recycling loop of mobile phones will lower the CO2e of the existing chain and allow the extracted metals to stay with businesses in the country where the e-waste was used.

SDG 13 aims at slowing current weather changes and their impact by integrating climate change in governmental and industrial policies. This thesis targets on eliminating redundant mobile phone transportation in Canada and recycling minerals that are already in the city resulting in significant CO2e gains when compared to the current mobile phone recycling design.

Mining is an industry with an innovation rate comparable to mature industries like manufacturing. The number of major discoveries has decreased and the exploration expenditure is increasing. With a lower investment in property, plant, and equipment (PP&E), urban mining companies could have higher return on assets (ROA) here defined as net income after taxes divided by assets (Dunbar, 2017).

Economic development is correlated with the use of non-renewable stock of metals and other resources. Precious metals are recyclable by nature and they can be used over and over again.

The stock of metals in cities is part of their wealth and metal and other elements should not be exported (UNEP, 2010).

The barriers to recycling mobile phones include keeping the public informed about the need to recycle, collecting mobile phones through the appropriate recycling channels, finding recyclers that can process the mobile phone’s various components, preventing the leakage of mobile phones to informal recyclers that export mobile phones to developing countries, preventing users from throwing mobile phones in the garbage, having progressive laws that stimulate recycling technologies, and having low barrier to entry technologies that allow developed and developing countries to extract precious metals from mobile phones and e-waste.

The carbon impact of the mobile phone industry can be divided in 4 areas: manufacturing, shipment, usage, and recycling. A review of the environmental reports of the main manufacturers

(Apple, 2017a; Huawei, 2017; Samsung, 2017) of mobile phones show that they have initiatives to improve the efficiency of their mobile phones assembly lines and increase their take back, but

Apple’s effort still depend on the transportation of mobile phones back to Cupertino.

This research accesses the recycling of precious metals from mobile phones, estimates its carbon footprint, and reviews new low barrier to entry technologies that recover precious metals from mobile phones and e-waste in general. Recycling will not replace mining, but low barrier to entry technologies can lower the CO2 from mobile phone transportation and increase the availability of precious metals. The low barrier to entry technologies that this thesis proposes will have a global impact on precious metal recycling.

This study focuses on Canada and the province of British Columbia, but the lessons can be used throughout Canada and the world.

1.2 Research Questions and Objectives

The questions this thesis asks are:

• Is there a better way to recycle precious metals from mobile phones?

• How can the carbon footprint of the current mobile phone recycling strategy be lowered?

• Which low barrier to entry technologies should be used to recycle electronic scrap

material (ESM) from mobile phones and e-waste in general? Which is economically

viable and ready to be used at an industrial level?

• How will the low barrier to entry technologies add value to e-waste recycling?

• Can low barrier to entry technologies be applied to e-waste in Canada? Can these

technologies be extended to other countries?

There are many technologies to recover gold, but they are mostly costly, hazardous, and require a significant investment to be operational. This thesis focuses on low energy technologies that can be easily adopted in B.C., Canada, and the world.

The following are the research objectives:

1. Describe the mobile phone exponential evolution and the limitation of its recycling,

specially, in B.C., Canada. The problem is seen from the perspective of different

disciplines.

2. Identify a low barrier to entry technology to recycle precious metals from mobile phones

and e-waste that allows precious metals and other elements to be extracted in the vicinity

of where e-waste is consumed, used, and discarded.

3. Estimate the potential CO2e reduction of low barrier to entry mobile phone recycling

technologies.

1.3 Thesis Outline

The rapid process of urbanization and the increasing number of people in vertical cities is generating an unprecedented amount of MSW that is not properly processed nor recycled.

Urbanization is happening without the proper investments in basic infrastructure and e-waste ends up being exported to developing countries. Mining mobile phones and other type of e-waste is important to keep landfills free from hazardous waste and an opportunity to extract precious metals from ore that is already above the ground and in urban areas.

Chapter 1 characterizes the problem end of life (EOL) represent to municipal solid waste (MSW) and public health. The thesis will study and illustrates the main topics with graphs. The

10 exponential growth of mobile phones, a type of e-waste very rich in metals, around the world since the 1990s is reflected on increasing quantifies of mobile phones that are currently reaching their EOL. The chapter follows with the motivation for the research and the questions and objectives that are based on climate change and sustainability.

Chapter 2 starts with the evolution of urbanization from the first cities to the current trends, the growth of municipal waste and its impact on public health. The thesis then explores the sigmoide shaped adoption of mobile phones and explores its various impacts. The invention of the printed circuit board and semiconductors marks the start of mass consumption of electronics and the e- waste production, chemicals disposal, and e-waste recycling problem. The chapter reviews statistics about climate change and the main emitters of carbon, the exponential growth of mobile phone, and the global market for devices. The public health subchapter explores the human health consequences of manually recycling e-waste in developing countries.

Chapter 3 has the literature review and it starts with a summary of the methodology used. The extended product responsibility legislations subchapter studies the role of the government in legislating, nurturing a regulatory environment, and partnering with non-profit agencies focused in recycling mobile phones. The smelters subchapter focuses on the importance of the main smelters after highlighting important points from their annual reports and the drivers of their business. Mobile phones travel around the world to be recycled by a few smelters. The chapter continues pointing the limitations of liquid cyanide and its recycling alternative recycling like biocyanidation. Bioethics explores the evolution of synthetic biology and the evolving policy and governance guidelines.

Chapter 4 contains the system dynamics model that starts with the population growth in the province and the respective mobile phone adoption. The s-shaped mobile phone adoption is the basis to the depletion of precious metals from the Canadian mines and the potential transportation CO2e savings from processing the mobile phones locally. A low barrier to entry mobile phone processing facility in B.C. is evaluated.

Chapter 5 is a short summary of the thesis. Chapter 6 envisions and details the necessary future work that will allow the current work to mature and become viable at the industrial level.

Chapter 2. Background and Context

The first cities were formed around 5,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a quarter-moon shaped area along the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in the Middle East where Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon are today. Cities may have reached 30,000 inhabitants then (Brady, 2017) and they had to decide what to do with their gradually accumulating waste.

Cities were formed in locations convenient for trading. In addition to the Middle East, cities grew and flourished in the Indus Valley about 4,500 years ago reaching 35,000 people. Further

East, Chinese settlements in Changzhou date back to at least 3,500 years ago. Another ancient city, Teotihuacan, Mexico, is from 100 CE. Teotihuacan reached over 20 sq. km with a population between 50,000 and 200,000 settlers (Brady, 2017).

The main characteristics of early cities are associated with having more population than previous settlements, the existence of social classes, the enforcement of taxes, the building of monumental structures, the development of writing, the beginning of science, the flourishing of foreign trade, and the documentation through the arts and, more specifically, drawing (Childe, 1950).

The urban waste generated in these cities was relatively small and it consisted mainly of human and animal excrements, and organic waste. One of the first open sewages was built in Rome to drain urban refuses and excess materials that were directed into the Tiber River. Medicine at the time saw the causes of diseases in the environment and, particularly, in the air. Public health professionals alerted about the way waste was treated.

The significant growth of MSW happened during the industrial revolution between 1770 and

1870. During the late 1800s, the newly mathematical branch of statistics revealed that there were more deaths than births in cities and that urban life expectancy was lower than in the countryside. It was clear that the cumulative effect of the contaminated land was the cause of it.

Public health professionals called for better management of human excreta, cleaning of homes and public roads, and the return of food waste to the countryside (Barles, 2014).

Around the same period, Europe became the focus of urban design: cities were designed geometrically with unique and inventive diagonals and squares. Cities also became darker places during the industrial revolution and they lacked waste management standards. It was not until the late 1900’s that utopians tried different experiments to provide better quality for the factory employees and their children. Cities like Bourneville were built with differentiated houses for the factory employees and green areas around it. Bourneville had hospitals, museums, reading rooms, and public baths. Later, Ebenezer Howard proposed the garden city with a small compact town and green areas around it. The population limit of the city was 30,000 inhabitants with another 2,000 living in the associated urban areas (Brady, 2017). The march of urbanization had started and these were attempts to humanize cities.

In the 19th century, the collection of refuses and mud from the streets evolved to a managed municipal solid waste and mud was sold to agriculture and other materials to local industries.

MSW standards varied significantly between cities. Marseille, French’s second largest city by population, was known for its poor waste management practices. Nice, on the contrary, stopped

14 discarding their waste into the sea and produced fertilizers, saved papers, carton, and recycled metals. In England, the first waste incinerators were tested in the 1870s. By 1932, 300 cities in

Canada and the United States had incinerators (Barles, 2014).

The twentieth century saw the increase of buildings height with the invention of the modern elevator in 1874 by Elisha Otis. The population density grew. A square meter of floor space supported by a steel beam needs 516 mj of energy per square meter of floor space and emits 40 kg of CO2e. A concrete slab floor requires 290 mj and emits 27 kg of CO2e. This is 6 to 19 times more CO2e than wooden beams used in buildings and houses (Alter, 2014).

Horse-drawn wagons and other means of transportations were used to haul solid waste from sewers, street piles, and rivers. In the 19th Century, specialized motorized garbage trucks were introduced and, since then, play a significant role in MSW collection. In 1938, the first garbage truck with a hydraulic compactor was patented, allowing the vehicle to carry more waste per route. Garbage trucks are one of the 100 objects that shaped public health (GHN, 2017)

By 1900, the global population was 1.65 billion and 14% were living in the 12 largest cities that exceeded 1 million inhabitants like Beijing, London, and Paris. The agricultural revolution had already happened and now the health revolution allowed people to live longer with better medicine and public health policies. The first wave of urbanization saw rural residents from

Europe, the Americas, and Oceania migrates to cities. The second wave is happening now in

China and Africa and at a much faster rate than the first one (Mills, 2017).

In 1912, the first sanitary landfill was built in England. By 1950, 60% of the garbage in England was dumped in landfills. Continuous layers of waste were placed and separated by inert matter.

During the Second World War, the waste was reduced as recycling increased. Public waste grew in the post-war Europe and the Environment Directorate General of the European Commission created a solid waste directive in July 1975. The United States created the Solid Waste Disposal

Act in 1976 with the intent of reducing waste by taxing the producer. Waste and the depletion of the ozone layer were now global issues (Barles, 2014). Recycling became important for the sustainability and preservation of the planet.

The concern for the environment and the formal economics of sustainability started with the rise of the population in Britain. In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote the book Essay on the Principle of

Population where he proposed, based on empirical data, the human population was growing exponentially while food availability was growing at an arithmetic rate. William Jevons, in The

Coal Question, published in 1865, expressed his concern about the gradual exhaustion of the coal supply in the U.K. In 1972, Donella Meadows and other published The Limits to Growth: A

Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind where the authors used computer modeling to understand the interaction of the world population with industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion. All resources but non-renewable ones grow exponentially and, therefore, non-renewable resources limit growth.

In 2011, 7 in 10 Canadians were living in one of Canada’s 33 census metropolitan areas, an increase of 68.1% compared with 2006. More than one Canadian in three was living in Canada’s largest metropolitan areas: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Canada is the least populous

16 country of the G8 comprised of France, Germany, Italy, UK, Japan, United States, Canada, and

Russia (Statistics Canada, 2011). Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal spend 10%, 5%, and 5% of their budgets respectively with MSW management.

Vancouver was founded in 1886 and had 2,700 people by 1900. By 1931, its population had increased tenfold. By the early 1990s, Vancouver had grown twentyfold. Constant growth resulted in increased demographic and environmental pressure in Metro Vancouver (Punter,

2003). Today, Canada has 35 million inhabitants; British Columbia, 4.6 million (S. Canada,

2017a); Metro Vancouver, 2.5 million; and Vancouver, 631,000 (S. Canada, 2017b).

2.1 Acting on Climate Change

The average global temperature rose by 0.750C since 1870 and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at 406.56 ppm level in September 2017 (NASA, 2017a). Burning fossil fuels constitute an obstacle to limiting the planet’s temperature rise to the maximum of 2% or, ideally, 1.5% above preindustrial level. Even if the world economy stopped emitting CO2 today, more than 50% of CO2e would remain in the atmosphere after 200 years, and more than

30% would remain after 1000 years, and 10% would remain after 30,000 years.

The surface temperature on the earth is proportional to the sun light coming in minus the light that is reflected plus the greenhouse gases divided by the Boltzmann’s constant as per equation

(2-1) (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 2013). The only variables that can be changed are albedo, the proportion of the incident light that is reflected by the earth’s surface, and greenhouse gases. To reduce climate change, the world economy must, in the short-term, reverse the GHG

17 emissions path; maintain the emission path around 3% per year; invent technology that can have net negative emissions.

1 ⎧⎡S (1− a)+ F ⎤ ⎫4 ⎪⎣ 0 ghg ⎦ ⎪ Tsurf = ⎨ ⎬ (2-1) ⎪ σ ⎪ ⎩ ⎭

where

!"#$% = '()*+,- /-01-)+/()-

So = sunlight (constant)

2 = 345/60+778' ,47'/+7/ 4) 9:7-/:, -7-);<

= = +5>-?4, 4) 1)414)/:47 4* /ℎ- :7,:?-7/ 5:;ℎ/ /ℎ+/ :' )-*5-,/-? >< + '()*+,-

BCDC = ;)--7ℎ4('- ;+' *4),:7;

The largest GHG emitters represent over 70 percent of the global emissions. The Canadian emissions of GHG are equivalent to 1.65% of the global discharges. The energy sector emits

611.6 Mt; agriculture, 57.5 Mt; industry, 22.6 Mt; and waste, 22 .5 Mt of CO2e (WRI, 2015). In

2008, developed countries represented 18.8% of the population that accounted for 72.7% of the

CO2 emitted since 1850. The poorest 45% of the population accounted for 7% of the planet’s emission in early 21st century numbers (CEMUS, 2017).

Ninety private and state-owned companies around the world supply fossil fuels to consumers and industries that generate two thirds of the GHG that accumulate in the atmosphere. The five leaders in emitting greenhouse gases are Chevron with 3.69 million metric tons of CO2 followed by ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell (Starr, 2016). Oslo, Norway, a top

10 oil exporting country, has the largest per capita fleet of electric vehicles (EV) thanks to tax incentives (Wikipedia, 2017d).

The waste management sector contributes 3 to 5% of the global emissions of GHG and other fluorinated industrial gases. Over a 100-year period, methane is 25 times more potent to warm the earth then carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, 298 times stronger. Black carbon, one of the substances emitted when burning waste, is a pollutant that is capable of affecting climate change that is not accounted as a GHG. Efficient MSW management can help reduce 10 to 20% of the global GHG by reducing waste at source, composting organic waste, and increasing waste recycling (Christian Zurbrugg, 2017).

Climate change is a difficult problem as the action is distant in time from the effect of climate change, which makes it hard for many individuals, companies, and governments to visualize the problem. Religion should play an important role in motivating their members to preserve nature for the next generation (Per Espen Stoknes, 2017).

The 32 pages long Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 by 174 countries and the European

Union (Nations, 2017). All countries gave a pledge of their intended emission targets from 2020 to 2030 prior to the agreement. The sum of carbon dioxide pledged was equivalent to a 3 to 40C rise on the temperature of the planet over preindustrial levels with the possibility of an 80C rise in some regions, a catastrophic target given that the world is already experiencing natural disasters attributed to climate change. There is no reference to the fossil fuel industry in the document and emissions from the aviation and shipping industries are not accounted for. The emission from these two industries are outpacing other industries (Anderson, 2017).

The decarbonization of the planet requires an increasing number of niche innovations, the weakening of existing industrial platforms and user preferences, and the strengthening of external pressures. The transition to an economy less defendant on fossil fuels includes investment in new infrastructure, development of new markets, and change in consumer preferences, and human behavior. Country-specific tax incentives, industry alignment and strategy, cultural influence, and civil society pressure determine a society’s low carbon transition. A multilevel energy transition happens with increased interaction between innovations and human behavior. The Danish electricity and heat transition is happening with the effort of local energy cooperatives, citizen groups, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses. The

French and UK governments plan to phase out petrol and diesel cars by 2014, but the transition phase needs to be well designed so public buy-out is maintained. Political changes, new business strategies, social acceptance need to be well aligned during decarbonization (Geels et al., 2017).

2020 is an important landmark to climate change. If emissions continue to rise or remain level beyond 2020, the temperature goals established in Paris will become unattainable. The following six milestones need to be reached: renewable energy must make up more than 30% of the earth’s electricity supply compared to 23.7% in 2015; cities need to continue to decarbonize buildings and other infrastructure stock at the rate of 3% a year until they reach almost zero emissions by

2050; electric cars need to account for at least 15% of the new car sales versus 1% market share today, mass-transportation infrastructure in cities need to double, heavy-duty vehicles must gain

20% in fuel efficiency, and aviation has to become 20% more efficient as well; land deforestation needs to stop as it accounts to about 12% of the carbon emissions and reforestation must start; heavy industries should continue to increase efficiencies and cut emissions; the financial sector needs to issue more ‘green bonds’ and invest wisely in climate change projects worldwide (Figueres, 2017).

A low barrier to entry technology to recycle precious metals from mobile phones would significantly contribution to the efforts to control climate change. This technology will lower the

CO2e represented by the transportation of mobile phones to smelters. Additionally, the various metals inside the device should be recovered in Canada thus lowering the CO2e equivalent to mining e-waste resources.

2.2 Mobile Phones

The world population reached 7.5 billion people in April 2017 and the number of mobile phones devices will reach 4.77 billion by the end of the year (Statistica, 2017). The user adoption of mobile phones around the world follows a logistic equation. The number of devices continues to

21 rise as more users can afford mobile phones and operator fees. Early adopters change their devices biannually. Users mention battery life and screen resolution as limiting factors to using a mobile phone more often.

The first mobile phones weighted about 5 kg in 1984. In 1985, the weight had already dropped to

770g and, in 1989, 349g. A 75g device became available in 2001 and the exponential growth started. In 2016, there were over 4.61 billion mobile subscribers in the world (Statistica, 2017).

Figure 3 - Evolution of the Mobile Phone (UNEP, 2009b)

Motorola received approval from the U.S. Federal Communications in 1983 to manufacture the

DynaTAC, one of the first mobile phones on the market (Geyer & Blass, 2010). The first call was made in New York City in 1973 when Martin Cooper, head of Motorola’s Communication

System Division called his competitor, Dr. Joel S. Engel, head of Bell Labs (Guiness, 2015).

Mobile phone services became available in the U.S. in 1983 and, today, mobile phone access is higher than water, electricity, and the Internet (WBG, 2016).

The latest mobile phones contain more than 50 elements. Mobile phone manufacturers use an increasing number of elements to improve the device’s functionality such as higher resolution displays. Different elements are used based on their availability and price. Table 1 compares the elements used to manufacture mobile phones from 2001 versus 2005. During that period, manufacturers used 53% less gold, 39% less silver, 180% more aluminum, 200% more chromium in each mobile phone (Polák & Drápalová, 2012).

Figure 4 – Global Mobile Phone Suscriptions (CWTA, 2016) (ITU, 2017)

A mobile phone has a case, display, circuit board, battery, frame, and peripherals. It contains elements of the following families: metalloids, alkali earths, other metals, transition metals, and rare earth metals (Pacific Earth Museum UBC, 2016). Mobile phones are 96% recyclable and the rubber keypad is the only component that is not (CWTA, 2009).

Table 1 - Selected Materials in Mobile Phones (Polák & Drápalová, 2012)

From the manufacturer point of view, recycling is an activity that is not part of their supply chain. Apple receives and recycles mobile phone online or through their retail store network as part of their renew and recycling initiative (Apple, 2017b). For every 100,000 iPhone 6 devices, their Liam robots can potentially recover more than 10 elements: 0.3 kg of gold, 24.0 kg of rare earth elements, 7.0 kg of silver, 0.4 kg of platinum group metals, 800.0 kg of copper, 1,900.0 kg of aluminum, 55.0 kg of tin, 550.0 kg of cobalt, 3.5 kg of tungsten, and 2.5 kg of tantalum

(Apple, 2017a). The limitation here is the number of devices returned to an Apple store. Apple is one of the first companies to recover rare earths.

Table 2 - The Components of an IPhone (Pacific Museum of Earth, UBC)

The decline of gold ore grades across the different producers of gold since the 19th century illustrates the importance of recycling gold. Mining of lower grade ore is expensive and it consumes more energy from fossil fuels, therefore, emitting more CO2e. Figure 5 shows the drop of the gold ore grade in Canada, South Africa, USA, and Brazil from 1835 to 2010 (UNEP,

2013). The Australian drop is the most dramatic one around 1870. The overall contraction from

20 g/ tonne Au is consistent as a trend.

Figure 5 - Average Gold Ore Grade from 1830 to 2010

Gold is a good conductor of heat and electricity and it is widely used in printed circuit boards

(PCBs). The production of gold is energy and water intensive heavily and impacts the environment from ore mining to gold refining. The environmental impact of the end-to-end production process of gold, excluding the cyanide toxicity, is estimated at 0.85 t CO2e/ oz Au based on the economic value of co-products in refractory ores (Norgate & Haque, 2012). The above constant is low relative to other estimates like the New Zealand Gold Fields 2010 carbon footprint estimate of 1.51 t CO2e/oz Au (Promethium Carbon, 2010). The number will be used to estimate the future CO2e impacts of low barrier to entry mobile phone recycling.

The 0.85 t CO2e/ oz. Au rate was generated under the following assumptions: gold was the main metal of the mine, gold was extracted from open-pit mining the strip ratio was 3 tonne of waste rock per tonne of ore, refractory and non-refractory ores were analyses, and the average grade was 3.5 g Au/ t of ore. There are other assumptions related to extraction, recovery, and refining.

When compared to other minerals, gold has the highest output at 1 million tonnes of waste per tonne of gold produced compared to 110 t/t metal for copper (Norgate & Haque, 2012).

Manufacturing of mobile phones can be estimated by arbitrarily using the numbers from the 32

GB iPhone 7: 56 kg of CO2e of total greenhouse gas emissions which 78% is spent in production, 18% in customer care, 3% in transport and 1% in recycling. Multiplying 44 kg of

CO2e by 1,488 billion phones shipped in 2016 (as a proxy for manufactured) results in 65.5 million tonnes of CO2e (Apple, 2016). Apple reports pursuing energy efficiency efforts in its facilities and using renewable technologies like solar arrays, wind farms, biogas fuel cells, and micro-hydro generation systems as well as purchasing energy from grids that use renewable energy and infrastructure (Apple, 2017a).

Samsung, Apple, and Huawei manufacture almost 50% of the mobile phones in the market. In the past, Nokia, Ericsson, and Sony were important players in the North American market. Out of these manufacturers, only Apple has an active recycling program through their retail stores and a line of robots that can disassemble their mobile phones. The fact that Apple sells a limited number of mobile phone models facilitated their process of automating recycling with robots.

Table 3 - Global Mobile Phone Market Share

1,488 billion mobile phones were shipped worldwide in 2016 times 18 mg per phone results in

26.8 tonne of gold or 10.5% the annual gold demand for electronics in 2016. The significance of mobile phones in the total demand for gold is less evident: 0.62% (26.8 divided by 4,309 tones in

2016). Recycling jewelry and other products represent a significant percentage of gold availability and PCB recycling represents a significant source.

Figure 6 - Change in Annual Gold Demand, 2016 vs. 2015

Figure 7 – Technology Demand for Gold, 2016 vs. 2015

Local recycling of mobile phones creates a new business model that can be summarized using the business model and the value propositions canvas structure (Lewandowski, 2016).

Recovering precious metals from mobile phones with bacteria at a point of entry that allows small businesses constitutes a value proposition significantly better than small business that use

29 household chemistry to perform the same job. Leaching with bacteria is scalable and less intensive and safer than other technologies. Key partners of these businesses are the mobile phone recycling organizations and other electronic organizations. The key activities should be to process printed circuit boards only, but separating the PCBs from plastics, battery, etc., may occur in the beginning of the business. The key resources will be well-trained employees and a clean and spacious area to put the reactor, the raw material and output. The cost structure most important components are labor and the reactor. The revenue is composed of the sale of the extracted metals and the sale of the PCB with non-precious metals.

2.3 E-Waste

WEEE, or e-waste, are electrical and electronic equipment that depend on electrical currents or electromagnetic fields to work properly (Grant et al., 2013) and whose parts have been discarded because they are useless or unwanted (U.N. University, 2014b). E-waste corresponds to 5% of the MSW volume. Global e-waste was estimated at 41.9 tonnes in 2014 and it is forecasted to reach 65.4 in 2017. Only 15% is properly recycled (Heacock et al., 2016).

Worldwide, small equipment (12.8 Mt) was the largest category of e-waste in 2014 followed by large equipment (11.8 Mt), temperature exchange equipment (7 Mt), screens (6.3 Mt), small IT

(3 Mt), and lamps (1 Mt) totaling 41.9 million tonnes of e-waste. Most of the e-waste was generated in Asia (16.0 Mt), followed by the Americas (11.7 Mt), and Europe (11.6 Mt). Europe has the highest e-waste generation per capita at 15.6 kg per inhabitant (U.N. University, 2014).

There are 2 categories of e-waste (consumer electronics and computers) in the U.S. and 6 categories in Europe: small IT (mobile phones and personal computers), cooling and freezing temperature exchange equipment (refrigerators and air conditioners), screens and monitors

(televisions and laptops), lamps (LED and straight fluorescent lamp), large equipment (washing and copying machines), and small equipment (gaming devices and camcorders).

The waste hierarchy of e-waste starts with prevention followed by minimization, reuse, recycle, and other recovery strategies including energy recovery, landfill, and controlled disposal. All these different stages require an appropriate technology (Education, 2017). In developed countries, 12% of mobile phones are recycled, 40% of mobile phones are kept as spare, 18% are given to friends and family, 9% are sold or traded for newer phones, 12% are recycled, 7% are lost or broken or stolen, and 14% have another end. In developing countries, 5% of the mobile phones are recycled, 32% are kept as spares, 24% are given away to friends, 16% are traded for new phones, 17% are lost or broken or stolen, and 6% have another end (Tanskanen, 2013).

The invention of the printed circuit board (PCB) happened with the creation of the radio in 1942.

At the time, electronic components were hand-soldered to each other, a method that restricted automation. The engineer and inventor Paul Eisler, an Austrian refugee in London, created the

PCB that was initially used in anti-aircraft missiles. Later, the PCB was adopted in nearly all electronic goods that were mass produced (World, 2017).

The miniaturization of the PCB and the creation of the microchip happened around 1958 while the engineers Jack St. Clair Kilby and Robert Noyce worked at Texas Instruments. Jack Kilby

31 won the Noble Prize in physics in 2000 and Robert Noyce went on to co-found Fairchild

Semiconductor. Robert Noyce would later cofound Intel Corporation (Wikipedia, 2017a, 2017e).

Today, the U.S. has 10 of the top 25 microchip manufacturers in the world; Japan has 7; Taiwan,

3; Europe, 3; and Korea, 2 (Source, 2017). Silicon Valley is a center of PCB design and manufacture. Since the 1980s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified

29 superfund sites in the region and 20 are related to the microchip industry. Superfund sites are very hazardous areas in the U.S. where the water percolated through the soil carrying dangerous chemicals on its way to subterranean watersheds threatening the water supply of the region. The removal of contaminants in these sites will continue into the future (Gabrys, 2011).

Superfunds can be vulnerable during natural disasters. The September 2017 hurricane Harvey inundated the San Jacinto Waste Pits, a superfund east of Houston. Liquid mercury, a neural toxin harmful to the brain and nervous system, was blown from the site during the strong winds

(NYT, 2017). The EPA proposed a $87 million cleanup plan and the project is closed for public comment since January 2017 (EPA, 2017).

The Basel (1992), Rotterdam (1998), and Stockholm (2004) Conventions are agreements to restrict the international movements of hazardous and persistent organic pollutants (POP), specifically, to developing countries (Education, 2017). From 1995 to 2009, China imported 4.5 to 45 million tonnes of various waste materials including mostly paper, followed by metal, plastic, and other materials. In 2016, China spent over $18 BLN importing 45 million tonnes of waste and, on July 18th, China announced to the World Trade Organization (WTO) that it will

32 ban the imports of 24 categories of solid waste by the end of 2017. The U.S. is a major solid waste supplier to China and America Chung Nam, a California-based supplier of waste paper shipped 333,900 containers mostly to China (Economist, 2017).

Waste paper, metals, and plastics are crucial to fast growing countries, but they often contain toxic materials like lead and mercury. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing estimates the Chinese import of ferrous and non-ferrous metals in 2004 to be worth USD 1.8 billion, the waste paper to be around

USD 0.7 billion and the value of the plastics imported to be USD 0.5 billion. China imports heavily because its industry needs cheap raw material. China has cheap labor and waste processing is labor intensive. More importantly, recycling is less polluting and energy dependent than mining for raw materials. Waste fills containers that would otherwise return empty to China. And Chinese waste regulations are less strict than in developed countries (Goldstein, 2013).

China and India are urbanizing at fast rates and the investment in their MSW infrastructure does not match the pace of their growth. Many of the countries in Africa whose populations are migrating to cities will double the waste they generate in the next 20 years. Today, three billion people worldwide either dump or burn their waste in the open. Rapid urbanization and the unsustainable growth of MSW, poor urban planning, and inadequate recycling processes has caused landslides in landfills that have killed at least 220 people in the last 18 months in

Shenzhen, China; in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and in Colombo, Sri Lanka (Liu, 2017).

The Basel Convention Mobile Phones Partnership Initiative (MPPI) in 2002 organized 12 manufacturers and 3 telecom operators to create a sustainable partnership to promote

33 environmentally conscious management of end of life mobile phones (UNEP, 2015). An effective mobile phone recycling policy raises awareness about its design and easiness to disassemble, promotes its refurbishing, bans the disposal of mobile phones in the existing waste outlets, makes mandatory retailer and producer take-back campaigns and the creation of collection points, encourages educational campaigns to inform the community about the mobile phone MSW problem, monitors the shipments of EOL mobile phones (Education, 2017) .

87 countries, excluding the U.S., ratified the Basel Convention (Wang, Zhang, & Guan, 2016) as a framework for the environmentally sound management of hazardous waste. It is a guideline for countries to quantify their e-waste, encourage countries to continuously educate their companies on the various types of e-waste and technologies to manage it, develop the know-how to manage all types of e-waste, and have an incentive system that generates compliance among its members.

These principles should be adopted at the international, national, and local levels (UNEP, 2012).

The lack of e-waste management legislation and insufficient law enforcement are the main obstacles to the development of sustainable practices worldwide.

People recycle when they understand the benefits of their action: 59% of college graduates and

57% of adults 55 years and older recycle on a daily basis. 81% recycle to help reduce landfills;

69% to save trees; 62% to conserve energy, 45% to create jobs, and 33% to make money. 25% do not recycle because the recycling plan is not easily accessible, 10% because it is time consuming, 10% because they forget, 8% do not know what is recycle and what is not, 6% think it is costly. When they are unsure if the item can be recycled, 50% throw it away, 26% will look up if its recyclable one more time, and 18% put it in the recycle bin anyway (Ali, 2017).

According to the EPA, for every 10,000 of MSW that ends up in landfills, 1 job is created. If that same amount of waste is diverted from landfills, it can potentially create10 recycling jobs or 75 jobs in the dismantling of equipment and parts reuse business (Education, 2017). This work proposes low barrier to entry technologies to recycle precious metals proposes that will create jobs around the world close to where mobile phones and e-waste are consumed and discarded.

2.4 Public Health

The public health literature categorizes health hazards from poorly managed municipal solid waste into the following risk groups: infectious diseases from waste, the contamination of drinking water from chemical and biological hazards, the emergence of air pollutants in landfills, the release of air pollutants from incinerators, and the poisoning of food by waste chemicals that reach the soil (Frumkin, 2016).

Infectious diseases are climate sensitive and they are moving to higher latitudes and altitudes, away from warmer weather, change in rainfall pattern, moisture, and wind speed. In Europe, the number of pathogens that can infect humans is estimated to be between 1,415 and 1,752. Out of the top 100 human and top 100 domestic animal pathogens that cause significant clinical diseases, 43% are in both groups. Zoonotic pathogens are more sensitive to climate change than non-zoonotic ones (McIntyre et al., 2017).

Persistent organic pollutants, dioxins, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and elements like lead, chromium, cadmium, mercury, zinc, nickel, lithium, barium, beryllium from e-waste cause harm

35 to humans and other living organisms. These chemicals are found in PCBs, batteries, cathode tubes, power supplies, lamps, capacitors, and transformers (Grant et al., 2013).

The Minamata Bay disaster that occurred in Japan between 1932 and 1968 is an example of food contamination. The tragedy started with the chemical company Chisso Corporation, or JNC

Group since 2012, improperly discharging inorganic mercury into the bay (Wikipedia, 2017c).

Bacteria present in the water transformed mercury into methyl mercury, which accumulates in fish. The local people that ate the fish developed different disorders including neurological and congenital abnormalities. 1,784 people died (Frumkin, 2016; Wikipedia, 2017c). In 2016, the

Grassy Narrows band was eating mercury-contaminated fish with mercury from Cray Lake that was 10 times the daily adult intake limit (TheStar, 2016). In June 2017, the Ontario government committed to cleaning up the Wabigoon River (TheStar, 2017).

China and Africa receive 80% of the world’s e-waste as shown in appendix D. 100,000 people work as waste recyclers in Guiyu, China and 40,000 in Accra, Ghana without proper work regulations, safety equipment, and work procedures. Parents and their children are commonly employed in these e-waste mining sites. The exposure to hazardous substances happens through water, air, soil dust, food and it affects primarily children and pregnant women. The work in e- waste dumpsites includes burning cables, breaking apart toxic solders, and discarding waste material that expose workers to high risk chemicals, persistent organic pollutants, brominated flame retardants, and many other cumulative toxins (Heacock et al., 2015). Improper disposal of fluorescent tubes, tilt switches, computers, and batteries introduce mercury into the environment.

Mercury becomes most dangerous when it reacts with other chemicals forming methyl mercury, an organic compound that bio concentrates, accumulates, and magnifies (DukeEWaste, 2017).

Due to the compactness nature of e-waste, pollutants are set free as a mixture when components are broken down manually and compounds cannot be analyzed in isolation. Exposure time and the addictive effect of different chemicals need to be considered. Health outcomes associated with working with e-waste without adequate equipment and procedures include change in thyroid function, cellular expression and function, adverse neonatal outcome, changes in behavior, decreased lung function, lower vital capacity in 8-9 year old boys living in the e-waste recycling town when compared to a control town, increase in spontaneous abortion, stillbirths, premature births, and reduced birth weight (Grant et al., 2013). In Guiyu, China, the mean concentration of lead in the blood of children was 15 µg/dl. Treatment is recommended for children with levels over 10 µg/dl (Ogunseitan et. al, 2009; 60Minutes, 2009).

Agbogbloshie, a dumpsite in Accra, Ghana, imports and processes 215,000 tonnes of e-waste. It is the largest WEEE site in Africa (SBS_Dateline, 2011) and it is ranked one of the 10 worst toxic threats by the Pure Earth/ Blacksmith Institute, whose mission is to identify harmful and clean up polluted sites in poor communities around the world (Earth, 2017). The Agbogbloshie site creates job opportunities for 4,500 to 6,000 workers and 1,500 jobs indirectly. The e-waste enters Ghana through other African ports like Durban, South Africa; Bizerte, Tunisia; Lagos,

Nigeria. These alternative routes allow the shipments with hazardous materials to bypass the

Basel and Bamako, a treaty of African nations to ban the import and control the movement of hazardous waste within Africa, conventions (Stoler et al, 2017).

In Agbogbloshie, young children go through open-air e-waste looking for equipment that can yield metal. They inhale the smoke without protection, which makes them cough, gives them headaches, and compromise their development. The full impact of e-waste on the workers of

Agbogbloshie and the areas reached by its smoke is unknown. The lead measured in the soil in

2014 by Green Advocacy Ghana was between 1,000 and 2,000 ppm depending on where the measure was taken. The WHO recommends 400 ppm. In 2010, 80 workers had their blood and urine tested and the results showed high levels of contamination. There are no official health statistics of this e-waste dumping site in Ghana (RT_Documentary 2016). Ghana ranks 153rd in life expectancy out of a list of 183 countries compiled by the WHO (Wikipedia, 2017b).

The largest food market in Accra is adjacent to the Agbogbloshie dumpsite and the food gets exposed to the toxic components that drift with the wind. The air quality of the city is compromised. Pregnant women, the elderly, and children that do not work in the dumpsite also get exposed to the smoke containing toxic material (SBS_Dateline, 2011). Asian, European,

North American and Oceania countries ship e-waste labeled as ‘working second hand goods’ to

Africa, with Ghana as a final destination (RT_Documentary 2016).

Ghana, a signatory of the Basel and Bamako conventions, benefits from the USD105 to 268 million annually from the economic activity that happens in the Agbogbloshie site that impacts

200,000 people. The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) is aware of the environmental and health risks associated with the Agbogbloshie site, but the Ghana government has not improved the working conditions and interconnected public health issues in Agbogbloshie.

Airborne, waterborne, foodborne, and dust-borne toxins from the Accra e-waste sites are the main sources of poisoning of human tissues and bodily fluids. Blood samples from e-waste workers show elevated concentrations of heavy metals (cobalt, chromium, copper, iron, selenium, zinc) and flame-retardants. Burning and dumping from the recycling sites have affected the Korle Lagoon, Odaw River, and other coastal water sources close to Accra. E-waste pollution impacted aquatic plants, animal species, and Accra residents that ate seafood.

Interviews with e-waste workers show that half of them are more concerned with day-to-day problems rather than long term ones like respiratory problems and cancer. E-waste workers have limited access to health care and rely on self-treatment and traditional medicine. The workers do not use protective equipment (Stoler et al, 2017).

Computer data that was not properly erased at the point of shipment ends up in Ghana, China,

India, and other countries that receive e-waste for recycling. Routinely, the wrong individuals retrieve confidential information contained in hard drives. The information is then used for identity theft and terrorism and e-waste sites become international security concerns.

International treaties address public health concerns: 2002 Bangkok Statement on Children’s

Environmental Health, 2007 Solving the E-Waste Problem Initiative, 2008 Bali Declaration,

2009 Busan Pledge for Action on Children’s Environmental Health, Geneva Meeting on E-

Waste and Children’s Health, and the 2013 Pacific Basin Consortium for Environment and

Health. In order to be successful, these initiatives have to guarantee food, health, environmental, personal, community, and political freedom to individuals. Interventions such as the one

39 proposed by the United Nations and Unesco’s StEP initiative suggested keeping the manual dismantling of e-waste in developing countries, but shipping more complex parts to be recycled in developed countries (Heacock et al., 2015). Engineering has to improve the environmental conditions and, eventually, redesign e-waste so it uses less toxic materials (Heacock et al., 2016), and create recycling technologies.

Low-barrier to entry recycling technologies to recover precious metals from mobile phones add value to public health as they reduce the exposure of e-waste recyclers to toxins, foster the creation of local chains to recycle e-waste, avoid the international transshipment of re-waste reduce the CO2e in the atmosphere, and create local procedures to shred and destroy computers and hard drives close to where it is used and discarded.

Chapter 3. Literature Review

A formal literature review of the following disciplines was conducted for this thesis: climate change; municipal solid waste management; public health; history; economics; environmental legislation; international relations; logistics; mining, environmental, and metallurgical engineering; molecular biology; synthetic biology; and biotechnology. Interviews were conducted with UBC faculty and staff members, different recycling companies in B.C., and

Encorp Pacific, a not-for-profit, product stewardship corporation. Phone interviews were organized with the mobile phone recycling companies in Canada. The objective of this literature review is to understand the mobile phone cycle from different perspectives and its low energy recycling technologies.

The interest in e-waste among Internet users as measured by Google Trends in a scale from 0 to

100 is a time series that starts at 36 in January 2004; peaks at 100 on November 2008, goes back to 94 on April 2010, 89 on October 2012, 77 on April 2015, and moves back to 42 in September

2017. The interest in the search word e-waste during the period comes from Ghana, Kenya,

India, and Australia. In 2007, the interest in e-waste originates from Sydney, Mumbai, and

Singapore (Google, 2017). Regional search engines preferences explain geographical data bias.

Baidu, Sogou, QiHoo 360, Chinaso, and Youdao are the main search engines in China.

The climate change literature is vast and centered on the latest climate change reports from the

U.N. and its agencies, NASA, IMF, and the World Bank Group. Newspapers like the New York

Times and the Guardian cover climate change routinely. Nature and Science have been publishing articles about climate change extensively and there is hardly a week when one of

41 them does not publish an article about it. During 2017, The University of British Columbia

(UBC) hosted talks from Dr. Mark Jacobson from Stanford University and Dr. James Hansen from Columbia University. The assessment of climate change impact in Canada came from the

Minister of Natural Resources, Health Canada, Statistics Canada, among others.

The climate change literature was reviewed to access the relevance of the savings generated by simplifying the recycling flow of mobile phones in Canada. Search engine queries were used to identify the latest technologies to recycle precious metals by using terms like gold recycling using bacteria, bioleaching, Chromobacterium violaceum, e-waste recycling with bacteria, e- waste AND recycling, e-waste AROUND (2) bacteria, and the use of Google Tools.

The selected literature focuses on extended product responsibility (EPR) and the management of mobile phones and batteries after they are discarded and cannot be refurbished. EPR and product stewardships are an attempt from industry and government to work together to promote recycling and the reuse of its products in the manufacturing of new ones. The thesis describes how Canada and B.C. are implementing EPR.

The recycling literature covers the limited availability of precious metals and the role of smelters in recovering them. While urban mining will not replace traditional mining, it can contribute to the extraction of metal resources and the creation of local jobs. If mobile phones are processed locally, more jobs will be generated in the regional economy. Different aspects of large smelters are reviewed: current technology, financial reports, operations, capacity, and financial results.

Smelters use hydro and pyrometallurgy to process e-waste from all over the world. The maritime

42 transportation of mobile phones from the Americas to Europe, for example, results in significant quantities of CO2e. Local low barrier to entry recycling of precious metals from mobile phones and e-waste in general can save a significant amount of CO2e in the recycling chain.

The emerging technology literature reviews biotechnology-based processes to recycle precious metals. The articles review the cyanide-producing bacteria C. violaceum, its genetic characteristics, and the genetic experiments using bioinformatics techniques that have resulted in the bacteria producing more cyanide. The bacteria itself can be purchased off the shelf.

System dynamics (SD) is a method to model and simulate complex issues characterized by periods of flow and accumulation. A stock is the accumulation of the inflow minus the outflow over time represented by an integral equation. SD is used on many disciplines from business to public health and engineering modeling. System Dynamics is used in simulations that have multiples inputs and unexpected outcomes.

This thesis literature reviews the adoption of mobile phones and the devices contribution to climate change. It evaluates the environment legislation in Canada and the province of British

Columbia in particular. Other topics studies are the recycling chain of mobile phones and the refurbishing industry, the limited number of smelters in the world, and the low barrier to entry technologies that will help redesign the recycling of mobile phones and e-waste extensively. This body of knowledge will help answer the questions of what to do with the sheer volume of mobile phones and e-waste and what are the breakthrough innovations that can safely recover precious metals from mobile phones.

3.1 Legislation

Extended Product Responsibility (EPR) is an environmental management strategy made of legislation and policies (Gui et al, 2013) to improve the recycling of selected products. In 1997, six Swedish mobile phone manufacturers organized the first mobile phone take back and recycling initiative in Sweden and the U.K. Their main objectives was to raise consumer awareness, create a recycling infrastructure, and study consumer behavior (Tanskanen, 2012).

Canada generated 224,000 tonnes of e-waste in 2010. The Canadian government through its

Environmental Canada agency regulates the international and provincial shipments of hazardous substances according to the 1999 Canadian Environmental Protection Act and international conventions. The provincial governments are responsible for EPR governance and policy.

Consumers take EOL mobile phones, batteries, e-waste and other products to recycling depots.

In the case of mobile phones, the product stewardships created depots for item collection and transport them recycling companies in Ontario and Quebec. Municipal governments manage waste and provide recycling education (E. Canada, 2014).

In December 2008, the British Columbia Recycling Regulation of October 7, 2004 was amended to include mobile phones in addition to primary and rechargeable batteries to their waste management directives. The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation of Canada (RBRCC), a subsidiary of Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation (RBRC), created the Call2Recyle initiative with manufacturers, distributors, and importers in order to plan the lifecycle and collection of batteries under 5 kilograms and mobile phone devices (Columbia, 2010).

The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) operates Recycle My Cell

(RMC) as the mobile phone stewardship in B.C. since November 10, 2009. RMC operates with

CWTA staff and resources. CWTA members include Bell, Blackberry, Google, Microsoft,

Rogers, Samsung, TELUS, and others (CWTA, 2015). Mobile phone providers have their own take back program and provide discounts to buyers trading in their old devices.

Apple is the only mobile phone manufacturer that operates its own recycling program. The company collects IPhones, Mac notebook and other Apple devices through their Apple Renew and Recycling programs via their retail network. Apple either refurbishes their equipment or extracts precious metals and other elements using their own line of robots (Apple, 2017b).

In 2014, there were 379 fixed drop-off locations in 77 cities across British Columbia (CWTA,

2015). In B.C., the Recycle My Cell network of mobile stores and bins at recycling depots accepts mobile devices that are able to connect to a cellular or paging network. This includes mobile and smart phones, wireless PDAs, pagers, headsets, and chargers. Cordless phones, laptop computers, and answering machines are not accepted (CWTA, 2009).

Recycle My Cell is the mobile phone EPR, but it is not the only program that actively asks consumers for their used mobile phones. The Call2Recycle seeks mobile phones in conjunction with their battery recovery program (CWTA, 2015). Recycle My Cell uses 4 companies to disassemble mobile phones and recycle components: FCM Recycling in Lavaltrie, Quebec; Global

Electric Electronic Processing Inc. in Barrie, ON; GREENTEC in Cambridge, ON; and

ReCellular, Inc. in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Brampton, ON.

The number of mobile phone units that both Recycle My Cell (RMC) and the mobile operator network collected from 2009 to 2014 peaked in 2012. RMC collected 42,520 devices in 2009.

The first numbers from operators and C2R are available in 2010 when RMC collected 35,771 devices and the operators, 24,159 and C2R, 15,306. In 2011, the numbers were 30,771 from

RMC, a surprising 76,687 from operators, and 29,877 from C2R. In 2012, RMC accumulated

63,413; operators, 146,350; C2R, 27,418. In 2013, RMC assembled 99,332; operators, 73,670;

C2R, 31,739. The numbers then drop in 2014 and RMC gathered 72,842 EOL mobile phones; operators, 61,331; and C2R, 29,594. Yearly totals are 42,520 in 2009; 74,959 in 2010; 137,335 in 2011; 237,181 in 2112; 204,731 in 2013; and 163,767 in 2014.

Batteries and mobile phones go through different recycling processes. Batteries and mobile phones collected under Call2Recycle in B.C. are shipped to Ontario for sorting. From there, they go to other facilities in Ontario, U.S. and Europe. Nickel-containing batteries go to Pennsylvania, lead-containing to Quebec, lithium batteries to Ontario. These facilities use thermal recovery processes to recycles nickel, iron, cadmium, lead, and cobalt from batteries (Columbia, 2010).

The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) conducted a survey in 2016 to understand how Canadians use and dispose their mobile phones and (CWTA, 2016):

- Most Canadians have one mobile phone that they bought new

- On average, Canadians use their mobile phone for two and half years

- Canadians have owned 4 mobile phones prior to their current one

- 41% of Canadians store their mobile phone at home prior to disposing it

- Almost 50% of Canadians have a mobile phone stored at home

- 16% of Canadians give away the last phone they used, 12% recycle it, 10% trade it in at a mobile phone store, 4% through it away in the garbage, 3% sell it, and 2% donate it to a charity

- Cash or take back discounts are the biggest incentives to recycle

- 25% of Canadians keep their phones because they do not know what else to do with it.

- 36% of Canadians are aware of recycling programs and 15% are aware of Recycle My Cell.

The survey was conducted by phone and online. 3,000 Canadians were randomly reached across

Canada in (CWTA, 2016).

B.C. is the largest implementation of EPR legislation in North America with more than 23 stewardships with significant waste diversion: the materials recycled in 2011 reduced the equivalent of 38,500 cars off the road for a year in terms of CO2e and 440,000 barrels of oil according to an evaluation of the economic and environmental impact of EPR programs in B.C. presented to the Ministry of Environment and Metro Vancouver authorities in 2011 and published in 2014 (Fichtner et al., 2014).

CWTA/Recycle My Cell and Call2Recycle do not disclose their operating costs. They send their product to processors in Ontario and Quebec that will partially recycle mobile phones and send the remaining printed circuit board and other parts to smelters overseas (Fichtner et al., 2014).

This thesis acknowledges the importance of the ERP legislation and its implementation in B.C.

This work highlights the maturity of a low barrier to entry technologies that will allow the redesign of the mobile phone and e-waste recycling network in Canada and the world. These innovations will create a new recycling paradigm that will stimulate the local economy.

3.2 Smelters

There are close to 4.77 billion mobile phones (Statistica, 2017) in the world, but only a few nations have industrial smelters that can recycle them. The barriers to entry in this business are high: economies of scale, capital requirements, proprietary technologies, access to raw materials.

Smelters are metal producers that adapted their plants to recycle e-waste like Boliden in Sweden,

Umicore in Belgium, Aurubis in Germany, Korea Zinc in Korea, and JX Nippon in Japan.

The most common technology to recover metals from e-waste is pyro metallurgy that consists in raising temperatures above 1,500oC to liquefy metals. Hydrometallurgy is composed of different processing techniques that use wet chemistry to separate precious metals from other materials.

Hydrometallurgy uses hazardous chemicals and aqueous solutions to recover metals through solubilization with aqua regia, precipitation of soluble, concentration, and other metal recovering techniques. Leaching is the first process to dissolve metals into an aqueous solution.

Aqua regia, a nitric acid and hydrochloric acid (HNO3 +3 HCL), dissolves metals like gold (Au), silver (Ag), platinum (Pt), and palladium (Pd) into soluble solutions. Other precious metals not covered in this thesis like ruthenium (Ru), rhodium (Rh), Os (Osmium), and Ir (iridium) do not dissolve in aqua regia, but can be recovered by pyrometallurgy. Although silver (Ag) quickly dissolves in aqua regia, it immediately precipitates to silver chloride (HNO3+ 3 HCl -> AgCl

(solid)) and it does not go in the solution. HNO3 alone is used to dissolve silver (HNO3 -> Ag+

(solution)). There are different leaching techniques and this thesis concentrates on the ones used to extract precious metals from electronic scrap material from printed circuit boards. Vat leaching is commonly used to recover gold from electronic scrap material. Cyanidation is used to dissolve and separate solid gold and silver ((CN)-1 + O2 (gas) -> (Au+3 (solution) and Ag+

(solution)). Chlorination can be used to separate platinum and palladium in another pressure leaching process. After leaching, concentration and purification further concentrates and separates the precious metals (Education, 2017; TheIPMI, 2014a).

Electrolytic reduction uses electrolysis to transfer electrons through a solution to drive chemical reactions to separate gold and silver from different sources. The electrolytic cell contains the process in which a direct current is used to pass electricity from a cathode, a negative charged electrode, to an electrolyte, the solution, to the positively charged anode. The metal extraction happens as the cathode gains electrons and accumulates metal. The cathode is then removed

(Education, 2017; TheIPMI, 2014b).

Pyrometallurgical methods have been around longer than hydrometallurgy. Pyrometallurgy requires heating and smelting operations to concentrate or extract metals. Precious metals are treated as building blocks that connect other building blocks until they are ready to become pure precious metals. Different pyrometallurgical processes like calcination, oxidation roasting, reactive gas refining, reduction melting, and fusion melting are performed in different sequences depending on the raw material: ore or electronic scrap material. Precious elements melt at high temperatures: silver (9610C), gold (1,0630C), palladium (1,5550C), and platinum (1,7700C).

High temperature furnaces using plasma and induction-melting techniques may be required to extract these elements.

Calcination (Metals + Organics + O2 (from air) -> Metals + Ash + CO2 + H2O) is the thermo decomposition process used to remove volatiles by burning off materials like photographic film to obtain silver (Ag), electronic materials to extract gold (Au), and catalysts to obtain platinum

(Pt). In roasting, metals are oxidized transforming metal sulphides into metal oxides

(Ag2S + 3/2 O2 (g) --> Ag2O + SO2 (g)) that can then be dissolved and extracted by leaching. The result is a granulated smelter matte, which is then crushed and leached to leave a rich residue of precious metals. Nickel (Ni) and copper (Cu) can be extracted using this technology (Education,

2017; TheIPMI, 2014c).

The Miller process, patented in England in 1867, is still a good method to separate silver and metal impurities from high-grade gold alloys. The process works by bringing chlorine gas in contact with the alloyed gold when the metal is in a liquefied state forming chloride salts of silver (Ag + ½ CL2 (g) -> AgCl (s), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn) and gold (Au) that remain in a purified and durable condition at 98% pure gold. The pressurized carbonyl process is a technique to remove nickel from platinum group alloys. Carbon monoxide is set at a high pressure and nickel carbonyl gas is stripped out: Ni + 4 CO (g) -> Ni(CO)4 (g). Reduction smelting reduces a salt of a metal to its metallic form (2 AgCl +Zn -> 2 Ag + ZnCl2). Fusion melting is the dissolution of metals into various molten salt mixtures that will be used in chemical reactions.

Precious metals that were not melted in aqua regia can be fuse melted with lead oxide (PbO), sodium carbonate (Na2CO3), borax or sodium tetra borate (Na2B4O7), and carbon (C) that will

50 react to form a lead alloy containing all the precious metals. Finally, the purity expected at the end of its processes is 99.95%. Banking, trading, and pharmaceutical companies require a purity level of 99.999% or higher (Education, 2017; TheIPMI, 2014d).

Boliden, a Swedish town where rich deposits of gold were found in 1924, is also a CAD 6.3 billion conglomerate whose revenues come equally from mining and smelting. The company has

4,878 FTE (full time equivalent) and is among the largest 10 mining and smelters in the world. It is one of the 10 largest lead producers in the world with operations in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Ireland. Smelters are less cyclic businesses than mines and the company has been benefiting from the increased volume of e-waste worldwide. The smelter Ronnskar with 800 FTE in northern Sweden recycles electronic scrap with a capacity of 120,000 tonnes per year. In 2015, the Ronnskar and Harjavalta smelters produced 17,608 kg of pure gold (Boliden, 2015).

Auribus is a CAD 15.9 billion companies based in Germany with 6,321 employees that recycles and manufactures copper and copper based products in Europe and North America. In fiscal year

2014/15, recycling precious metals was its second most lucrative business (CAD$3.4 billion) after producing wire rod (CAD$5.8 billion). The company recycled 958 tonnes of silver and 45 tonnes of gold in 2014/15 (Auribus, 2014).

Umicore is a CAD 14.1 billion company with 10,429 employees in Europe and North America.

42% of its revenues come from the automotive catalyst-recycling unit, 25% from recycling metals and other elements, 22% from energy and surface technologies, and 11% from discontinued operations. The recycling unit represents 39% of the EBITDA and 35% of the

51 company’s capital expenditure. Umicore states in their annual report that they are compliant with the 2012 section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act where U.S. stock listed companies need to declare if their tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold originated from The Democratic Republic of Congo or a bordering country (Umicore, 2015).

Umicore integrated smelter unit in Hoboken, Belgium cost USD 1 billion and it can recover 20 different metals from auto catalysts, PCBs, and batteries (Hagelüken, 2012). The plant has a yearly capacity of 350,000 tons of e-waste. The precious metals flow through the smelter, leaching and electro winning, and then refinery. The base metals go through the blast furnace, lead refinery, and special metals refinery (UNEP, 2009).

SRTI, former Sus Recycling Technology Inc., founded in 1980, is a medium size smelter in

Taoyan, Taiwan certified to collect, transport, recycle, and treat hazardous industrial waste

(SRTI, 2017). The company sources e-waste from partners and uses cyanide and other chemicals in a semi-automated operation. As Taiwan is an exporter of electronics, SRTI recovers trace amounts of aluminum, silver and gold from clots that were used to clean electronic parts during manufacturing. 100 kg of cloth yield 1 kg of silver and the remaining ash is processed so gold and platinum can be recovered through electrolysis while the remaining ash is used in concrete production (LinusTechTips, 2017).

Sims Recycling Solutions (SRS) is a semi-automated, medium size smelter in Mississauga, ON that processes 75,000 Mt of e-waste annually from North America, Europe, and other continents.

From computers to mobile phones, e-waste is shredded and placed in the conveyor belt where

52 magnets separate ferrous from non-ferrous metals and sensors divide glass from plastics

(TreeHugger, 2011). SRS recovers precious metals and copper from circuit boards, processors, computer memory and other components using pyrometallurgy. An Infograph in the company website illustrates hard drive data being destructed as part of recycling and estimates the global data breach to cost companies and individuals USD 3.79 billion annually. Hard drives manufactured before 2007 require multiple wipes; a single wipe procedure is sufficient for hard drives manufactured after 2007. If necessary, hard drives can also be shredded (Solutions, 2017).

SRS recycling process is complex and efficient, but it requires significant investment.

This thesis focuses on low barrier to entry recycling technologies that will change the smelter business by allowing smaller companies to recycle e-waste. One company may dismantle the mobile phone or e-waste apart and specialize in plastic recycling. Another will recycle precious metals and, eventually, other elements. The objective is to lower the investments required to process e-waste and make its operation low energy dependent. Government regulations and the current EPR designed supply chain will need to be revised in order to promote new low barrier to entry recycling technologies.

3.3 Biocyanidation

Cyanide has been the primary leaching reagent for gold mining for over 130 years. Its main characteristics are high gold recovery, market availability, and low cost. John Stewart MacArthur documented the cyanidation process and received a British patent in 1887 (Hilson &

Monhemius, 2006). Today, an estimated 20% of the world production of cyanide is used to manufacture sodium cyanide, which is solid. 90% of sodium cyanide is used in gold mining.

The remaining 80% of the world cyanide production is used in the chemical industry to produce

53 nylon and other organic chemicals like nitrile used in superglue and medical gloves. The typical dilute solution of sodium cyanide (NaCN) is 0.01-0.05% cyanide and gold is first dissolved and later extracted (Hilson & Monhemius, 2006).

Cyanide is deadly in high concentration. It is a serious threat to human health and the environment. In large quantities, it prevents oxygen to reach the cell because it binds to iron- carrying enzymes in the blood. The result is oxygen starvation and suffocation. Birds, livestock, and fish experience the same symptoms. Cyanide is found in various organisms in nature.

Different microorganisms create cyanide. 2,500 plant species produce it as part of their normal metabolism (Hilson & Monhemius, 2006). In West Africa, where cassava is part of the diet, the human daily consumption can be one-half of a lethal dose and that can be the reason for the high incidence of neurological diseases in the region (Knowles, 1976).

An alternative to cyanide has to take the following requirements into consideration: the availability of the compound, its extraction costs, and its recycling risks. Other important factors are the environmental toxicity, the potential for a cyanide alternative to be used in large-scale mining and tailings, and easy detoxification (Hilson & Monhemius, 2006).

Bioxidation is a technology that treats the ore with bacteria to disintegrate the ore. Bioxidation leaves the metals in their solid phase. Bioleaching, a process that resembles industrial gold cyanidation, uses bacteria to dissolve gold from a sulphide mineral or a mobile phone circuit board, so that it becomes available in a solution with other elements that are later removed

(InfoMine, 2016).

Biocyanidation is a form of bioleaching that removes the metals present in PCBs making them available in a solution from where the different metals will later be separated. The bacteria

Chromobacterium violaceum has proved to be a potent bacterium to leach gold. C. violaceum is a mesophilic, gram-negative, and facultative anaerobe bacterium that leach gold by generating cyanide from glycine. Cyanide is produced during the early stationary phases of the bacteria (Li,

Liang, & Ma, 2015).

Biocyanidation with C. violaceum is considered a cleaner and more environmentally friendly technology than pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy. Cyanide synthesis by bacteria is restricted to C. violaceum, Fluorescent pseudomonades (P. aeruginosa and P. fluorescens), and certain fungi (Marasmius oreades, and Clitocybe sp.) (Knowles and Bunch, 1986).

3.3.1 Characteristics

Chromobacterium violaceum is a mesophilic, facultative anaerobe, small (3 million base pairs), violet-pigmented proteobacterium. It is gram-negative, with a thinner and less developed outer membrane when compared to gram-positives bacteria. The bacterium lives in tropical and sub- tropical weather and it is mostly non-pathogenic to humans. Occasionally, it causes deadly infection in humans and plants. C. violaceum causes skin irritation, blood poisoning (septicemia) and, in rare cases, fatal infection in humans and animals (Chi et al. , 2011; Durán et al., 2001).

The violet comes from the production of the nondifusable pigment with antibiotics properties violacein. C. Bergonzini discovered the violet colored bacterium in 1881 while experimenting

55 with ovalbumin solutions at the University of Modena in Italy. He named it Cromobacterium violaceum and Zimmerman corrected it to Chromobacterium violaceum. The first pathogenic study of C. violaceum was described by Wooley in 1905 when he described the bacterium as the cause of septicemia, blood infection, in water buffalos in the Philippines (Durán et al., 2016).

The University of Liverpool deduced the chemical structure of C. violaceum in 1958. Around the same time, DeMoss and Evans (R. D. DeMoss & Evans, 1959) discovered that to synthesize violacein the bacteria would need molecular oxygen and L-tryptophan. The phenotypic characteristics of C. violaceum include the production of violacein, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), antibiotics, and exoprotease that are regulated by the endogenous lactone N-hexanoyl-L- homoserine (Durán et al., 2001).

C. violaceum needs glycine as the precursor and methionine as a stimulator to produce cyanide as a secondary metabolite. The bacteria produces cyanide and converts it into γ-cyano-α- aminobutyric acid that catalyzes the synthesis of the cyanoamino acids (Durán et al., 2001).

The bacteria C. violaceum is a bleaching microbe that can dissolve gold from metallic particles of crushed printed circuit boards. C. violaceum produces the most quantity of hydrogen cyanide

(HCN) during its early stationary phase. Later, it trims the excess cyanide during the late stationary and death phases (Li et al., 2015; Tay et al., 2013b).

The comparison of C. violaceum with other bacteria shows that it achieves highest growth at

370C while other bacteria achieve their peak at 400C. C. violaceum produces HCN while the other bacteria do not (Boone et. al, 2006).

Biocyanidation is emerging as a leaching technology. The current limitations are the small amount of cyanide (20 mg) per liter of bacteria culture produced (Tay et al, 2013) and its long leaching time (Natarajan et al., 2015). The bacteria Pseudomonas fluorescens and Pseudomonas plecoglossicida were evaluated for their efficacy to extract gold from electronic scrap material from PCBs, but C. violaceum is more efficient (Willner & Fornalczyk, 2013).

To overcome these limitations, scientists from the National University of Singapore genetically engineered two new strains of the bacteria that successfully produced more cyanide lixiviant and dissolved more gold. The pBad strain, the most productive strain, recovered over 30% of the existing gold in the solution after 8 days (Natarajan et al., 2015).

Metabolically engineered C. violaceum strains produce 70% more cyanide lixiviant than the previously tested wild bacteria and have a faster growth rate and induction time. When tested with electronic scrap material (printed circuit board shredded and separated), it had a recovery rate of 25 to 30% of the total gold present in the waste after 6 days. The pBAD strain of the bacteria behaved better in lab tests (Tay et al, 2013).

The energy metabolism of C. violaceum energy metabolism is more efficient than other bacterial because it has six enzymes while other bacteria have fewer. The amount of cyanide C. violaceum generates depends on the media and nutrients it receives. The main organic nutrition for the bacteria is based on peptone, glycine, and yeast extract with salts in low concentration to catalyze and enhance the cyanide generation (Li et al., 2015).

The C. violaceum cyanidation process creates cyanide complexes composed of different metals and metalloids. Hydrometallurgical metals would be necessary to separate the gold, so another bacterium, Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans (At. ferrooxidans), is used to removed copper before gold is separated (Li et al., 2015).

The Chromobacterium violaceum used in cyanide leaching of gold has a biosafety factor of 2. It can be bought online, but there are import forms that need to be filled. It is stored frozen. The dimension of the ESM used in experiments was 100 microns.

The advantage of using C. violaceum bacteria to extract gold is that the process requires less energy and it has low operating costs (Li et al., 2016). The disadvantage so far is that it has long leaching time and a lower metal gold recovery when compared to cyanide

Table 4 - Important Bioleaching Factors (Willner & Fornalczyk, 2013; Liu et al.,

2016)

3.3.2 Experiments

In 2011, Lee and colleagues reported successfully leaching out gold and copper from PCBs using

C. violaceum. They bought the bacteria frozen from a supplier in Korea and restored it to life in a

100 mL solution (6.8 pH) made up of 5 g/L of polypeptone and 3 g/L of beef extract. The solution went into an incubator at 150 rpm at 300C for over 2 days to revive the bacteria. A recycling company in Korea supplied the mobile phones and the researchers manually separated the PCB from the other components and cut it to 1 mm by 1mm by using scissors. The sample was dissolved in aqua regia and was analyzed by atomic absorption spectrometer that showed

58% total metal content with 34.52% Cu and 0.025% Au (Lee et al., 2011).

The sample was then tapped in a 250 mL Erlenmeyer flask with 250 mL of the following media:

5 g/L yeast extract, 10 g/L polypeptone, 5 g/L glycine, and 1 g/L MgSO4.7H2O at 15 g/L pulp density while adding 1mL C. violaceum culture. The flasks went into the incubator at 30oC and running at150 rpm. The dissolved oxygen level was raised with the addition of 1 mL H2O2 after

24 h of leaching when the dissolved oxygen gets to a minimum (Lee et al., 2011).

The results show gold leaching at its highest, 10.9%, when the pH was 11.0 during 8 days. The copper’s leaching efficiency was 11.4% when the pH was 10.0. HCN was found to be more stable when the pH is greater than 10. H2O2 harms the bacteria if concentration is higher than

0.004%. With 0.004% (v/v) H2O2 and pH 11.0, the copper leaching efficiency was 25% and the gold one was 11%. The fact that copper has a higher leaching efficiency is related to the element being the most available PCBs. To increase the gold leaching efficiency, the copper content would have to be decreased prior to leaching with C. violaceum (Lee et al., 2011).

In 2015, Natarajan and Ping published a paper summarizing their experience bioleaching crushed

PCBs with the cyanogenic Chromobacterium violaceum, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and

Pseudomonas fluorescens. They noticed that the electronic scrap material (ESM) are toxic to the bacteria, so they first grew the bacteria to the point where cyanide production was maximized and then added the solid waste to the bacteria (Natarajan & Ting, 2015).

The ESM purchased for these experiments was made of particle sizes less than 100 um. The sample weighted 1.000 +- 0.005g. 40ml of aqua regia was added in Erlenmeyer flasks that were stirred for 24h. The researchers worked with pure cultures of C. violaceum (ATCC-12472), P. fluorescens (ATCCBAA-477), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (NRRL-B-14308) and mixed cultures of these bacteria. The bacteria cells weigh 0.1g and they were digested with aqua regia (2mL) to determine the amount of metals bioaccumulated and biosorped (Natarajan & Ting, 2015).

C. violaceum produced the maximum free cyanide out of the 3 bacteria: 20 mg/L with 0.5% w/v pulp density. Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Pseudomonas fluorescens produced 10 and 13 mg/L respectively. C. violaceum recovered the highest percentage (11.3%) from ESM with P. aeruginosa and P. fluorescens recovering 5.3% and 5.8% respectively. The combination culture composed of C. violaceum and P. aeruginosa had the best results of the mixed cultures reaching a maximum of 15 mg/L of cyanide and a gold recovery of 10.2%. The other mixed culture had lower results (Natarajan & Ting, 2015).

Gold recovery was at its highest (18%) with 0.5% pulp density. Higher (1, 2, 4%) pulp densities and two-step bioleaching showed significantly inferior results. Copper recovery was highest at

80% recovery with 0.5% pulp density. The high percentage of copper recovery shows that it can be leached by other lixiviant produced by the bacteria and reagents (Natarajan & Ting, 2015).

The metal composition of the bacteria after the addition of the ESM shows bioaccumulation inside the bacteria. The EDX spectra and metal composition output display a significant percentage of copper (92.41%), gold (6.26%), silver (0.31%) and other metals like iron, tin, and lead (Natarajan & Ting, 2015). Appendix E shows TEM images of the bacteria before and after bioaccumulation including other metals absorbed.

Li and colleagues reviewed the different biocyanidation experiments depending on when the

ESM was added to the culture in order to determine when cyanide production was at its highest.

They divided the different techniques in: one-step bioleaching, two-step leaching and spent medium leaching, where bacteria cells are separated from the media after the maximum production of cyanide is reached. Spent medium leaching is the technique that has produced the highest metal recovery results at all pulp densities (Li et al., 2016).

Tay and colleagues compared the proteins that can be expressed by C. violaceum and found that the bacteria could be genetically engineered to produce more hydrogen cyanide than the wild strain (Tay et al., 2013a). The production of C. violaceum of hydrogen cyanide (HCN) peaks during the stationary phase. During the late stationary and death phases, the bacteria produces the enzyme beta-cyanoalanine synthase, degrading and detoxifying excess cyanide and lowering environmental risk (Natarajan et al., 2015).

C. violaceum generates the cyanide lixiviant from glycine using the hcnABC operon, so the two genetically engineered strains received an additional cyanide-producing operon: pBAD hcn was induced by 0.002% L-Arabinose and pTAC hcn was induced by 1mM IPTG (Isopropyl β-D-1- thiogalactopyranoside). Both strains grew with the 15 µg/ml of the antibiotic gentamycin in order to avoid contamination of the wild type strain (Natarajan et al., 2015).

The experiment was conducted with ESM from printed circuit board using particle size less than

100 µm supplied by a third-party company. The bacteria (ATCC-12472) were purchased frozen and the culture was prepared with 15 µg/ml of the antibiotic gentamycin the day before C. violaceum was put in contact with the ESM. An hcnABC was removed from the genome of the wild strain and cloned into a vector, pUC- mini-Tn7T-gm, so that it could be integrated into the genome of another C. violaceum. pTAC and pBAD were amplified PCR amplified and the respective promoters were cloned upstream of the hcnABC operon and the additional operon was incorporated into the genome at the 3’ region of the glmS gene resulting in a vector that now carries two sets of cyanide producing genes compared to a the wild –type strain that is encountered in nature. This genomic integration technique using Tn7-mediated transposition was developed by Choi et al. (Natarajan et al., 2015; Choi et al., 2005).

The 1g ± 0.005 samples of ESM were put together in 250 ml Erlenmeyer flasks at to 40 ml of aqua regia and stirred for 24 h to dissolve gold and platinum and the metal composition of the

ESM was determined using a ICP-MS (Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometer). C. violaceum was initially cultivated in LB media without ESM and, when the cyanide production was maximized at in the early stationary phase, ESM was added at pulp density that varies

62 between 0.5% and 4% w/v. Finally, the bacteria cultures stayed in an incubator at 170 rpm for over eight days after the ESM was added (Natarajan et al., 2015).

The pBAD strain extracted more gold with the optimum amount of pulp density of 0.5% after 6 to 8 days. The pTAC strain had a similar performance to the pBAD strain until day 4. The wild strain recovered consistently less gold than the two strains (Natarajan et al., 2015).

There are many process and bacteria focused experiments to be carried out in order to obtain a more potent C. violaceum. The bacteria’s limitation in terms of biocyanidation has not yet been found. The initial results are promising for this energy efficient and economical technology that can be used worldwide to recycle precious metals from mobile phones.

Finally, there are examples of industrial waste where bacterial leaching has been applied.

Lithium (Li) and cobalt (Co) have been extracted from lithium batteries using Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans. Copper (Cu), nickel (Ni), aluminum (Al), and zinc (Zn) have been removed from electronic scrap with the bacterium Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans and Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans and the content of metal leached reported is high (Willner & Fornalczyk, 2013).

The invention this thesis envisions is a bioreactor that can host different bacterium that will dissolve as many elements as possible from selected components of mobile phones and e-waste.

The reactor processes the e-waste powder and leaves gold in a state that it can be extracted. The same is valid for other precious and non-precious metals that will be leached.

Chapter 4. A System Dynamics Model

This thesis uses system dynamics, a non-linear approach to model the recycling of precious metals from mobile phones in B.C., Canada. The model presented in Figure 8 is divided in four distinct areas to facilitate its presentation. The areas answer different questions and they have distinct input, dynamics, and output. In B.C. Population, the model simulates a logistics mobile phone adoption curve for the province. World Reserves (USGS, 2017) connects the manufacturing of mobile phones to the world stock of metals. Global CO2e Savings quantifies the potential savings from not transporting mobile phones to smelters and not mining gold from traditional mines. The Projected Cash Flow area calculates the cash flow of the low barrier to entry business that is used for the NPV calculation.

The model starts with the simulation of the s-shaped growth of mobile phones in B.C. represented by the variable B.C. Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve. The nonlinear first- order system exhibits this pattern because the main feedback loop shifts as the system as the simulation progresses (Sterman, 2000). There are other two main variables in the B.C. population area: the Percentage of Population Adopting Mobile Phones inverse logistic curve that starts with one and then finishes at 0 after 12 years and the Net Mobile Phone Adoption curve that starts at 0, peaks at year 9 around 17%, depending on the simulation run, and returns to 0 after year 12. The output of the variable B.C. Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve and the Population Lookup result in the Total Mobile Phones s-shaped curve with real and forecasted number of mobile phone that is the basis for the rest of the model (see figure 9).

The Total Mobile Phones curve multiplied by the Tonne Au Per Mobile Phone (USGS, 2006) is the Au Depletion Rate. The world Au Resources stock is the result of the Au Discoveries inflow minus the Depletion of Resources. The model shows the impact that the mobile phones used in

B.C. have on the world reserves of gold and silver and can be expanded to other minerals. 4.77 billion phones worldwide equate to 162 tonnes of gold while the global reserves of gold are

57,000 tonnes today.

The Total Mobile Phones s-shaped curve is then delayed by 8 years, depending on the simulation, to produce the effect of EOL of the mobile phones and the start of their recycling.

The Percentage of EOL Recycled and Total EOL Mobile Phones curves give origin to the s- shaped EOL Mobile Phones to be Recycled that is shifted to the right according to the EOL

Delay. The Potential CO2 Savings in Tonne is calculated as the sum of the land and maritime transportation and the savings from not mining precious metals. It takes 29,820 tonnes of CO2e to mine 1 tonne of gold (Norgate, 2012).

The sigmoid EOL Mobile Phones to be Recycled curve is the basis for the Yearly Cash Flow variable that is calculated based on the gold and silver prices. The projected cash flows from

2022 to 2031 are the input for the NPV calculation as per table 8. The hypothesis is that the bioleaching technology will be improved and the bioreactor will be ready between 2018 and the beginning of 2022.

Figure 8 has the System Dynamics model and Appendix F has all the formulas of the model.

Figure 8 - Recycling Precious Metals from Mobile Phones System Dynamics Model

Table 5 - B.C. Population - Actual and Projection (B.C. Government, 2017)

Table 6 - Assumptions Used in the System Dynamics Model

Table 7 shows the output of the main variables in the model and their evolution from 2000 to

2022. The rapid adoption of mobile phones in B.C. is seen in other geographies in Canada and throughout the world. Currently, the EOL of mobile phones is 8 years and this includes mobile phones being stored at home prior to being discarded. With a trustworthy recycling system, individuals are likely to dispose their mobile phones earlier and in the correct recycling facilities allowing for the earlier recycling of precious metals.

Table 7 – Selected Variables from System Dynamic Model

The Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve simulates the 12 years s-shaped curve that brought the mobile phones to the current 76% adoption level (Statista, 2017) and 12 years is an approximation of the logistic adoption of mobile phones on the planet. The Total Mobile Phones graph translates the percentages in the previous graph into actual mobile phone numbers that is then used to show the depletion of gold from World Reserves through time. The model delays the total number of mobile phones by 8 years according to the expected EOL of mobile phones and multiplies the result by the weight of mobile phones without battery. This value is translated into the Potential CO2e Savings. The EOL Mobile Phone to be Recycled graph is the basis of the yearly cash flow that will be basis for the low barrier to entry recycling business. Figure 9 illustrates graphically the evolution of the main variables of the model. The B.C.

Recycling Precious Metals from Mobile Phones Scenarios with Different Adoption Rate, Percentage of EOL Recycled, and EOL Delay

a) The Mobile phone adoption curve variable is affected by the mobile phone diffusion rate in

B.C. The above results show 2 curves only as the simulation was run with 76% (current adoption rate in B.C.) and a future 86% adoption rates.

BC Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve

1 86%AdoptRate 0.9 90%EOLRecycled 0.8 EOLDelay=7 86%AdoptRate 0.7 70%EOLRecycled 0.6 EOLDelay=8 86%AdoptRate 0.5 80%EOLRecycled 0.4 EOLDelay=8

0.3 76%AdoptRate Percent of Population 90%EOLRecycled 0.2 EOLDelay=8

0.1 76%AdoptRate 80%EOLRecycled 0 EOLDelay=8 0 5 10 15 20 25

70 b) The actual total number of devices is the result of the BC Population Mobile Phone Adoption curve and the number of inhabitants in the province. There are only two curves in the graph below as the adoption rate was simulated with two viariations. The curve peaks at year 12 as an approximation of the world’s mobile phone adoption rate.

71 c) The depletion of gold from world reserves is cumulative and changes according to the adoption rate of the province. The curve becomes more noticeable to the world gold reserves when it is calculated for the total number of mobile phones on the planet. The number of mobile phones on the planet is about 4.77 billion and this number multiplied by 0.034 g per phone results in 162.2 tonnes of gold while the world reserves of gold is 57,000 tonnes.

72 d) The EOL Mobile Phones to be Recycled curve corresponds to the Total Mobile Phones curve shifted to the right by the variable EOL Delay multiplied by the Percentage of EOL Recycled.

The 5 simulations below use 8 and 7 as end of life delays. The curve with EOL Delay equals to 7 have the highest number of mobile phones to be recycled as they reach recycling earlier. The

EOL Delay does not change the number of mobile phones recycled. The Adoption Rate and

Percentage of EOL Recycled do.

e) The CO2e impact of a low barrier to entry technology that will allow the locally recycling of precious metals from mobile phones come from not transporting mobile phones by road within

Canada and by boat to smelters overseas. More importantly, a gram of gold from ore available in urban areas correspond to a gram of gold that does not need to be extracted from a CO2e intensive mine. All 3 streams of CO2e savings are proportional to the EOL Mobile Phones to be

Recycled variable. The CO2e from not mining is the highest value the adoption of a new technology can generate and it is estimated at 29,820 tonnes of CO2 per tonnes of gold as per table 6. As transporting mobile phones and not mining are mutually exclusive, the not mining amount is subtracted by the transportation one in the negative slopped curve below.

74 f) The earlier the EOL mobile phone is processed, the earlier the mineral returns to its cycle and the hazardous waste is appropriately processed. The simulations below calculate the impact of mobile phones only which correspond to about 5% of the global e-waste. Different e-waste has distinct quantities of elements, but the bottom line is that by processing other e-waste the cash flow projections of low barrier to entry e-waste business businesses could have a significantly higher return than the projections below.

Figure 9 - B.C. Mobile Phone Recycling Model Output

The model begins in the B.C. Population area with the logistic equation representing the

Percentage of Population Adopting Mobile Phones, the Net Mobile Phone Adoption yearly of

75 new mobile phones in B.C. feeding the B.C. Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve. Here are the equations:

Percentage of Population Adopting Mobile Phones =

⎛ BCPopulationMobilePhoneAdoptionCurve⎞ (4-1) Maximum Fractional Net Birth Rate * 1- ⎜ CarryingCapacity ⎟ ⎝ ⎠

Net Mobile Phone Adoption =

Percentage of Population Adopting Mobile Phones * BC Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve

(4-2)

BC Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve = (4-3) d(Population)/dt = NetChangeinPopulation = Inflow(t) - Outflow(t)

The Canadian Mines area shows the impact of the mobile phone adoption growth in the depletion of Canadian mineral resources, assuming mobile phones are built exclusively from

Canadian resources.

To simulate the delay between the activation of mobile phones and their EOL, the model shifts the Total Mobile Phone variable by 8 years.

The CO2e Savings area converts the number of mobile phones, now advanced by 8 years, into

CO2e produced by transportation and the CO2e equivalent to mining for gold in the field instead of extracting it from resources available above the ground:

EOL Mobile Phones To Be Recycled = Total EOL Mobile Phones * Percentage of EOL Recycled

(4-4)

Finally, the model calculates the yearly cash flow based on the price of silver and gold and their respective quantities from table 4. Using a carrying capacity of 66%, EOL Delay of 8 years, and

Percentage of EOL Recycled of 70%, the model calculates a yearly cash flow in 2022 that is rounded up to USD 55,000. This cash flow value is forecasted to be the same in the next 10 years and it is used to calculate 3 distinct net present values based on the arbitrary reduction of the recycling technology to 80%, 60%, and 40%:

10 46,431,648 NPV = 50,000,000 (4-5) ∑ t − t=1 (1+0.05)

The model runs for 22 years from 2000 to 2022 when the cash flow stabilizes. The NPV from the low barrier to entry recycling business assumes constant cash flow from 2022 to 2031. The assumption is that the bioreactor and the business will be developed by 2022.

Table 7 - Net Present Value of Single Recycling Business Under Different

Scenarios

Recycling precious metals from mobile phones is an NPV positive business in all scenarios above. The initial investment is an arbitrary value based on the research and manufacturing of a bioreactor with safety as a priority. The initial investment of USD 50 million dollars will be lowered as the technology spreads. The goal is to have a low barrier to entry precious metals recycling business that can be adopted by any country.

Chapter 5. Conclusion

The management of innovation usually happens in 4 phases: invention and prototyping phase, product introduction and adaptation stage, large-scale diffusion, and stabilization period. The innovation process is a log-term challenge of innovation and diffusion. As the low barrier to entry recycling technology matures, the bioreactor manufacturer will need to reinvent itself and create a service network for their products and develop business partners that can introduce the innovation to other countries.

The implementation of low barrier to entry technologies to recover precious metals from mobile phones adds significant value to the local economy. The payback of a low barrier to entry recycling facility comes from the creation of jobs, the recovery of metals, the public health benefits from better waste management, and the CO2e that is not emitted to the atmosphere.

Developing and developed countries will benefit from a disruptive technology that shifts the recycling business model from centralized to decentralized.

The bacterium C. violaceum is a well-documented metal recovering technology. The different universities working with the bacteria should be contacted so the University of British Columbia

(UBC) becomes part of the biotechnology network interested in mining WEEE. The same is valid for the other metal leaching bacteria as the ideal reactor can dissolve as many metals as possible.

The reactors need to be fully tested to safely store bacteria. They need to be designed, assembled, and used by individuals trained properly. C. violaceum can be purchased from specialized stores

79 and, once it is it is in the laboratory, it can be cultivated. The reactor will be made of a special alloy resistant to the various bacteria it hosts. Further research will determine how long does the bacteria last inside and the best way to dispose it.

Price, safety, usability, marketing and other factors will dictate the adoption of the low barrier to entry recycling technology throughout the world. The production of reactors depends on economies of scale. Governments and recycles alike need to understand the benefits of recycling mobile phones: CO2e reduction, no mobile phones in the landfill, no illegal exporting of mobile phones to developing countries. As technologies emerge to process additional elements other than gold, the more relevant the low barrier the entry technology becomes to recyclers.

The current Canadian mobile phone recycling model based on extended producer responsibility

(EPR) legislation will need to be revised in the future. The change of legislation needs to happen to encourage Canadian companies to recycle precious metals from mobile phones in the same geographical area in which they are used. Meanwhile, governments and the recycling sector need to continue to plan ahead for the mobile phones that are discarded. Trust in new and transparent recycling technologies will give confidence to the consumer to recycle their mobile phones.

Chapter 6. Recommendations and Future Work

The challenge of recycling a mobile phone is to make the public trust the existing recycling infrastructure. C. violaceum is an energy efficient technology to recycle precious metals from mobile phones.

This thesis recommends the investment in low barrier to entry precious metal recycling technologies. Use of the bacterium C. violaceum is the most promising emerging technology based on the following:

• Low barrier to entry: A safe bioreactor and C. violaceum are the technologies that will be the basis for a low barrier to entry recycling business. The bioreactor and the bacteria refills have to be priced so they are accessible across the world.

• Metals recovered: the initial goal of this technology is to recover gold. C. violaceum also extracts Silver (Ag), Copper (Cu), Iron (Fe), Lead (Pb), and Tin (Sn) as per appendix E.

• Technology readiness level (TRC) (Wikipedia, 2017f): The National Aeronautics and

Space Administration (NASA) defines 9 levels of TRC. C. violaceum has been tested and validated in the relevant environment in laboratory, which corresponds to TRC level 5. The bioreactor does not exist yet, but its design will borrow from existing ones. The next step is to increase C. violaceum’s production of cyanide and start working on a reactor prototype.

The next steps in the development of a low barrier to entry precious metal recycling business will be to establish partnerships within UBC to genetically engineer more potent strains of C. violaceum, develop a bioreactor, and architect a low barrier to entry recycling business workflow. Another important action item is to contact scientists in other universities working with C. violaceum. The development of a prototype of a low energy low barrier to entry recycling business involves multi-disciplinary work. The project is disruptive in nature.

6.1 Recommendations

The following work is recommended:

1. Contact researchers from different universities to collaborate with them

2. Reproduce experiments with C. violaceum to extract gold at UBC.

3. Genetically engineer new strains of bacteria to recover gold and other precious metals.

4. Research other bacteria to extract precious metals.

5. Work on a bioreactor that will make a low barrier to entry business possible

6.2 Future Work

This thesis recommends studying the recovery of gold with the bacterium C. violaceum. The studies in laboratory will reproduce the experiments that were conducted in different universities such as Colorado State University and the National University of Singapore. Researchers of these universities generated two strains of C. violaceum that are capable of generating 70% more cyanide than the wild type can. The strains can recover about 30% of the gold from crushed electronic scrap material. The next step is to create more potent strains of C. violaceum and recover additional metals that were dissolved with gold.

The recommended work is the following:

1) Contact researchers working with C. violaceum: different scientists researching C. violaceum and other bioleaching bacteria should be contacted and visited.

2) Experiment with C. violaceum: contact different UBC labs and experiment understand how to prepare the bacteria and ESM separately and establish a workflow.

3) Reproduce the genetically modified C. violaceum strains in laboratory: Scientists at the National University of Singapore have genetically engineered two strains of C. violaceum based on a technique developed at Colorado State University in 2005.

4) Generate more potent strains of C. violaceum: Once the technology to increase the quantity of cyanide the bacteria produces has been mastered, the target will be to continue to increase the cyanide efficacy of the bacteria and its ability to recover gold.

5) Build a prototype bioreactor: the recycling technology needs to be safe, easy to use, and low priced to be accessible to urban clusters around the world. Testing will incorporate various scenarios to guarantee the above.

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Appendix

Appendix A. British Columbia Population and Heat Map (Source: ESRI)

100

Appendix B. Sustainable Development Goals (U.N., 2015)

101

Appendix C. MSW Statistics for Selected Cities (UN-HABITAT, 2010)

102

Appendix D. WEEE and Children’s Health

103

Appendix E. Gold Bio recovery from E-Waste (Natarajan & Ting, 2015)

(a) TEM image of bacteria (before addition of ESM);

(b) TEM image of bacteria after bioaccumulation;

104

Appendix F. System Dynamics formulas

(01) Ag Depletion Rate=

(Tonne Ag Per Mobile Phone*Total Mobile Phones)*-1

Units: tonne/Year

(02) Ag Discoveries=

1e-30

Units: **undefined**

(03) Ag Price Per Tonne=

553640

Units: USD/ tonne

(04) Ag Resources= INTEG (

Ag Discoveries-Depletion of Ag Resources,

570000)

Units: **undefined**

(05) Au Depletion Rate=

-Tonne Au Per Mobile Phone*Total Mobile Phones

Units: tonne/Year

105

(06) Au Discoveries=

1e-30

Units: **undefined**

(07) Au Price Per Tonne=

4.13487e+07

Units: USD

(08) Au Resources= INTEG (

Au Discoveries-Depletion of Au Resources,

57000)

Units: tonne

(09) BC Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve= INTEG (

Net Mobile Phone Adoption,

Initial Population Fraction * Mobile Phone Adoption Rate)

Units: Percent of Population

The population accumulates the net birth rate. Initialized to a

fraction of the mobile phone adoption rate.

(10) BC Population Table(

[(0,4e+06)- (30,6e+06)],(0,4.0392e+06),(1,4.0769e+06),(2,4.1002e+06),(3,4.1239e+06

106

),(4,4.155e+06),(5,4.1958e+06),(6,4.2417e+06),(7,4.291e+06),(8,4.3494e+0 6)

,(9,4.4107e+06),(10,4.4659e+06),(11,4.4991e+06),(12,4.5463e+06),(13,4.58 9e+06

),(14,4.6453e+06),(15,4.693e+06),(16,4.7516e+06),(17,4.8164e+06),(18,4.8 734e+06

),(19,4.9314e+06),(20,4.9892e+06),(21,5.0484e+06),(22,5.1085e+06),(23,5. 1687e+06

),(24,5.229e+06),(25,5.2894e+06),(26,5.3496e+06),(27,5.4093e+06),(28,5.4 683e+06

),(29,5.5266e+06),(30,5.5837e+06))

Units: Dmnl

(11) CO2e Equivalent To Not Mining Gold =

EOL Mobile Phones To Be Recycled*CO2e tonne Per t Au*Tonne Au Per Mobile Phone

Units: Tonne CO2e

(12) CO2e Per Container=

26.33*5517*1.5e-05

Units: CO2e/ Container

(13) CO2e Per Truck=

5.2147

Units: CO2e tonne/ truck

4901km * 40l/100km * 0.00266 mt co2/ l 107

(14) CO2e to Ship Mobile Phones to Smelters=

Number of Containers*CO2e Per Container

Units: CO2e

(15) CO2e To Transport Collected Mobile Phones to Eastern Canada=

Number of Trucks*CO2e Per Truck

Units: Tonne CO2e

(16) CO2e tonne Per t Au=

29820

Units: tonne

(17) Depletion of Ag Resources=

Ag Depletion Rate

Units: **undefined**

(18) Depletion of Au Resources=

Au Depletion Rate

Units: **undefined**

(19) EOL Delay=

108

Units: Year

(20) EOL Mobile Phones To Be Recycled =

Total EOL Mobile Phones*Percentage of EOL Recycled

Units: tonne

(21) FINAL TIME = 22

Units: Year

The final time for the simulation.

(22) Global Savings from Not Mining and Not Transporting Mobile Phones to Smelters

-CO2e Equivalent To Not Mining Gold+CO2e to Ship Mobile Phones to Smelters

+CO2e To Transport Collected Mobile Phones to Eastern Canada

Units: Tonne CO2e

(23) Initial Population Fraction=

0.001

Units: Dimensionless

The initial population as a fraction of the carrying capacity.

(24) INITIAL TIME = 0

109

Units: Year

The initial time for the simulation.

(25) Maximum Fractional Net Mobile Phone Adoption Rate=

Units: 1/Period

The maximum fractional growth rate is set to 1, thus scaling

time so that 1 time unit = 1/g* (yielding the standard logistic

curve).

(26) Mobile Phone Adoption Rate=

0.86

Units: Individuals

The mobile phone adoption rate is 76% for BC.

(27) Mobile Phone Weight in Tonne=

0.000113

Units: tonne

mobile phone weight in tonne

(28) Net Mobile Phone Adoption=

Percentage of Population Adopting Mobile Phones * BC Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve

110

Units: Individuals/Period

The net birth rate is the product of the fractional net birth

rate and population.

(29) Number of Containers=

Weight in Tonne/26.33

Units: Containers

(30) Number of Trucks=

Weight in Tonne/20

Units: Trucks

(31) Percentage of EOL Recycled=

0.9

Units: Percent of EOL Devices

(32) Percentage of Population Adopting Mobile Phones=

Maximum Fractional Net Mobile Phone Adoption Rate * (1 - BC Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve

/Mobile Phone Adoption Rate)

Units: 1/Period

The fractional net birth rate is a linearly declining function

of the population relative to the mobile phone adoption.

111

(33) Population Lookup=

BC Population Table(BC Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve*1e+06/Mobile Phone Adoption Rate

)

Units: Individuals

(34) SAVEPER =

TIME STEP

Units: Year [0,?]

The frequency with which output is stored.

(35) TIME STEP = 1

Units: Year [0,?]

The time step for the simulation.

(36) Tonne Ag Per Mobile Phone=

1e-06*0.034

Units: Tonne Per Mobile Phone

(37) Tonne Au Per Mobile Phone=

0.034*1e-06

Units: Tonne Per Mobile Phone

112

(38) Total EOL Mobile Phones =

DELAY FIXED( Total Mobile Phones, EOL Delay , 0 )

Units: number of devices

(39) Total Mobile Phones=

BC Population Mobile Phone Adoption Curve*Population Lookup

Units: number of devices

(40) Weight in Tonne=

Mobile Phone Weight in Tonne*EOL Mobile Phones To Be Recycled

Units: tonne

(41) Yearly Cash Flow=

EOL Mobile Phones To Be Recycled*Tonne Au Per Mobile Phone*Au Price Per Tonne

+EOL Mobile Phones To Be Recycled*Tonne Ag Per Mobile Phone*

Ag Price Per Tonne

Units: USD

113