University of Twente Student Theses
The challenges of recycling critical raw materials and analyzing the alternatives
Shoubo, Mohammad Al Amin Kazi (2022) The challenges of recycling critical raw materials and analyzing the alternatives.
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| Abstract: | Low recyclability of the products can cause a dreadful situation for the environment, health and finance. A magnificent amount of e-wastes becomes free to the environment every year. Amongst those wastes, there are also a huge amount of critical raw materials such as indium, gallium, and cobalt exposed to the habitat. These CRMs are very crucial for the mobile phone industry. There are ample amount of reasons to address these materials as critical raw materials. However, the most important ones are insufficient collection, not mandating the policy properly and lack of recycling techniques. The research is made to tackle this problem and help the companies to reduce their waste by extracting more CRMs from the used products. A system dynamic tool called insight maker is used for modeling. The model helped to statistically analyze how the collection of the End of Use (EOU) and End of Life (EOL) could be increased and how the existing recycling process could end up with a great amount of critical raw materials. After simulating the model, it has been found that improved recycling technology certainly increases the stock of critical raw materials. At the very end of this paper, some replacements are discussed for the specified CRMs. Some interesting insights have been found including a very critical material indium is already replaced by graphene. Keywords— E-waste, CRM, Recycling, Smartphone industry, Metals, Indium, Cobalt, Magnesium, Gallium, Lithium, Environment, Policy, Insight maker |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Faculty: | EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science |
| Programme: | Business & IT BSc (56066) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/91927 |
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