Breaking Down Silos At Recycling
The need for global intellectual property collaboration to sustain an efficient circular local economy.
Today’s e-waste problem is massive.
- 80% of electronics is never recycled and ends up in land fills.
- It’s estimated a 40% increase in e-waste by 2030
- It costs 13 times more to obtain gold, copper and other metals from mining the ore than from urban mining.
Consumer electronics are rapidly changing and systems for managing e-waste aren’t keeping up. Popular features that consumers love — speed, sharp images, responsive touch screens and long battery life — rely on metals like cobalt, indium and rare-earth elements that require immense energy and expense to mine. But commercial recycling technology cannot yet recover them profitably, although several innovations are starting to emerge. In the past innovative recycling methods has turned waste to valuable commodities. However there are several challenges which innovation alone can’t solve and collaboration is one key aspect to sustain e-waste recycling.
This story points out the lack of collaboration between enterprises and nations that could result in a lost opportunity where millions of tonnes of valuable metals from e-waste could be salvaged.
E-Waste Producers and Recyclers
It’s well know that intellectual property strangles the circular economy . However there is also a growing disparity between where the e-waste is produced to where e-waste is efficiently recycled. Currently major developing economies like i.e. Brazil , India, China, Indonesia are amongst the top 10 countries generating e-waste. This is in sharp contrast to the top 10 countries where major office of first filing locations of e-waste patent activity is undertaken. Major countries of innovation in the field of e-waste treatment ( greater than 100) is mostly confined in developed countries and none of the top countries are developing ( China being the exception here — further explanation provided below)
China appearing the patent activity list is also relatively new phenomenon. Chinese activity has grown substantially from fewer than 50 new patent families per year prior to 2005, to almost 250 new inventions in 2010
The siloed recycling innovation
The pattern in the e-waste recycling innovation reveals another key fact. Each country or enterprise is trying to focus of specific aspect of e-waste processing innovation based on circumstances each country or enterprise deals with. Although Copper , gold, rare earth which make up more than half the value in e-waste, they are also the most difficult to extract from recycling and require more research and development. A patent landscape report on e-waste recycling technology reveals some of these interesting patterns.
- US activity concentrating on rare earth extraction — a higher absolute number of patent families from US based applicants than Chinese based applicants. 90% of the primary extraction of rare earth metals currently occurs in China and is not typically sold as an open commodity. This being the case, there is a strong incentive for US (and indeed, Japanese and European) electronics manufacturers to source these important elements outside of the closed market.
- Recovery of rare earth metals not only is fast growing, but also is one of the most heavily protected technologies in terms of geographic extension of protection. Taken together, this data point strongly infers that the field is a major emerging topic of interest to patent applicants.
- Russia’s focus on the extraction of non-ferrous metals such as lead, copper and nickel
- Applicants based in Taiwan, focus on decontamination of e-waste
- UK-based applicants focus on disassembly.
- The current Chinese entities’ relative focus at the “component” level, potentially indicating that e-waste streams are pre-dismantled in western developed economies prior to the stream reaching China.
This siloed approach towards innovation in recycling and lack of collaboration has made the circular economy inefficient. Whilst majority of the e-waste is generated in developing countries, the lack of innovation in recycling has led to inefficient recycling hence more wastage. For example if a dismantler lacks knowledge and tools of how to efficiently extract rare earth metals from a cell phone it would most probably end up in a land fill or be incinerated polluting the environment. At the same time developed countries with sophisticated recycling technologies are able to extract maximum value from e-waste locally but tend to ship lower margin components to countries specializing in dealing with such e-waste. This could also mean risk of such e-waste ending up with informal recycling hence polluting the environment.
The largest IP portfolios are all based in developed economies like US , Japan, EU. 90% of IPs are from for-profit companies. But still U.S. exports up to 40% of its e-waste. Some goes to regions such as Southeast Asia that have little environmental oversight and few measures to protect workers who repair or recycle electronics.
Dismantler in the guise of a recycler
One example is in India where most firms registered as recyclers are effectively dismantlers. Recycling requires specialized technologies, and that’s too expensive or often protected by strict patent laws limiting their number. One research report suggests that 80% of Indian recyclers are essentially dismantlers exporting valuable components like PCB to countries with relatively advanced e-mining capabilities leaving out the inferior waste to pollute within the country. Only about 18% of the authorized recyclers have the right technology for the efficient resource recovery.
Currently US and European based entities are those that appear to project their IP rights into several different locations, indicating a desire to commercialize their technology in multiple market locations. Conversely, Asian (predominantly Japanese) patent applicants tend to file their patents locally within Asia.
All of the largest patent portfolios are mostly based in developed countries, and none within BRICS countries (Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China, South Africa). BRICS activity is strongly tied to the smallest portfolios, indicating that activity in these countries (primarily China) is highly diversified and spread across hundreds of different entities.
Summary
Its important to break this siloed approach towards recycling innovation to sustain an efficient circular economy. A more globalized approach where enterprises could setup recycling facilities at the source of e-waste is the need of the hour. A typical e-waste like cell phone or laptop has multiple components like aluminum, copper, zinc, rare earth metals etc. Since different recyclers focus on specific aspects of recycling with latest innovation there is a need for all the recyclers to effectively collaborate based on e-waste composition globally and setup recycling locally based on volume which is the raw material for e-waste mining. This would prevent scenarios where untreated waste is illegally shipped and dumped into other countries.
