Gold: A key enabler of a Circular Economy

This lecture discusses facetes of the book chapter below.

Metals are an essential and critical component of today's society: a moment's reflection on their ubiquitous presence in virtually all energy and material production processes is sufficient to confirm this. Metals play a key role in enabling sustainability through various high-tech applications in society. However, the resources of our planet are limited, as is the strain to which we can subject it in terms of emissions, pollution, and disposal of waste. For these reasons, finding ways to lower the environmental footprint of our collective existence and therefore lowering greenhouse gas and other emissions is a vital priority. The principal theme of this contribution is the maximization of resource efficiency as well as enabling a circular economy (CE) through the recycling of waste electric and electronic equipment, with a focus on precious metals (PMs) (incorporating gold, silver, and the platinum group metals [PGMs]) and the base-metal industry that enables their recycling. The detailed and deep knowledge that is required to systemically fully understand resource efficiency in the context of a CE are discussed and the concepts of design for resource efficiency and design for recycling elaborated on. Specifically, the understanding of product-centric recycling is highlighted, setting it apart from the usual material-centric recycling approaches. The latter focus more on bulk materials and therefore inherently limit the maximal recovery of technologically critical elements in particular, as well as PMs and PGMs. The base metals – principally, copper, cobalt, lead, nickel, tin, and zinc – all play a crucial part in the present society. Increasingly, these are linked in concert to form the crucial carrier metals for the sustainable CE society termed the “web of metals” and “web of products” or, in a more modern paradigm, system integrated metal production–in other words, the process metallurgical Internet of things. This chapter also examines the special and crucial role base metals have in acting as enablers in any recycling efforts, as they also play a key role during recycling, such as copper and lead being the solvent of gold and other PMs and PGMs and release them during refining. Above all, the PMs are key economic enablers for the economic viability of recycling as well as the metallurgical infrastructure (system integrated metal production/Internet of things) that makes it possible to recover PMs and PGMs and their other associated elements.