Urban mining: great potential in smartphone recycling

According to the German Information and Telecommunications Industry Association, around 210 million unused smartphones are slumbering in German drawers alone. These contain, in addition to other precious metals and rare earths, about 3.57 tonnes of pure gold, corresponding to a current market value of more than €204 million. In most industrialised countries, there are significantly more smartphones in circulation than there are people living there. It is not only for reasons of waste avoidance that the recycling rate must be significantly increased.

With unused smartphones, new ones could be manufactured for a decade

A study by the German Institute of Economics (Deutsches Institut der Wirtschaft) published in early 2023 listed how valuable the individual, often rare, elements in “drawer phones” are and in what quantities they could be recovered. In addition to the considerable amount of gold already mentioned, these would be 399 kg of palladium, 105 kg of platinum, 1,388 tonnes of copper, 1,402 tonnes of aluminium, 546 tonnes of nickel, 1,520 tonnes of magnesium and some 1,946 tonnes of silicon. These and other raw materials used in producing smartphones have a pure material value of several hundred million euros and are sufficient in quantity to guarantee the production of enough new smartphones for German consumers for the next ten years.

Climate impact less than one-twentieth of mine production

An equally important factor in urban mining is reducing environmental and climate pollution as much as possible. According to calculations by the precious-metal recycling specialist Umicore, the emission of more than 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ could be avoided just by recovering the 3.57 tonnes of gold from the drawer phones. Minimising gold’s ecological footprint is also a concern of Deutsche Börse Commodities, issuer of Xetra-Gold. In addition to supporting the urban mining campaign of the Earthbeat Foundation, it has itself conducted a social media campaign, the #GoldPhoneChallenge, to inform and motivate as many smartphone owners as possible to hand in their drawer phones. https://www.xetra-gold.com/goldphone-challenge/