Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 2: Lithium and Indium

The photo below is actually related to blog 2, the problem of under-investment in recycling rare earths. $300 million for EV battery recycling may be too much, but $0 for indium may be too little.

Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 2: Lithium and Indium 

We need to be "small c" conservatives. "It doesn't take a genius to see the world has real problems, but it would take a whole roomful of morons to think [throwing government money] can fix it." (paraphrase from The Watchmen, 2009). Or better yet, yes, do fund these programs (at least to the degree government has subsidized mining and nuclear energy development), but make sure you have conservatives managing conservation.

The Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 1 took a critical "what could go wrong" with well-intentioned environmental policy to supply Electric Vehicles with recycled content Lithium batteries, focusing on a Wall Street Journal article on the shortage of Lithium batteries for planned "recycled content", and a more detailed focus on the need for more mining by Hans Eric Melin.

Government funding of Lithium recycling capacity ($200M in the "Inflation Act" budget) may not make a lot of sense if there's a shortage of batteries to recycle... or if it requires cannibalization of reuse markets.  The hospital shouldn't build a morgue so big that it needs to toe-tag every patient to feed it.

But the history of nuclear power - funded enormously by government research - may make a different case.

To make the case that it does make sense to invest SOME government funding in recycling, I'll now focus on the opposite problem - I can't find a buyer for indium bearing "black glass" from our Good Point Recycling flat screen TV reuse and recycling program.

My company has been setting aside the "black glass" from "liquid crystal diode" screens for several years. Apart from seeing them reused as roofing tiles in emerging markets (where it's not really popular because the are dark and absorb rather the sun's heat rather than reflect it like steel shingle), I just haven't seen a recycling market. Our competitors who shred the devices either discard the blackglass shred as "fluff", or perhaps put it into asphalt ("the solution is dilution").

But the indium in the glass should have a value.  We sent samples to a market for assay and analysis, and were told that a 20 ton truckload would produce $975 to $2000 dollars - which would be worth doing if you were already  processing lots of tons, but would take a heck of a toll on anyone investing in equipment to do it.  

We also tried contacting European smelter operators, like Umicore, in Belgium, but were told that while Umicore's furnace can in principle capture the indium, that it wouldn't fire up a furnace just to process this glass... the indium would only be recovered as a byproduct of processing circuit boards with high gold, palladium, silver content, etc.

We've been advertising 20 metric tons of this material for months. We got 3 or 4 responses, one of whom actually did a chemical assay on a sample of the glass.  It was positive revenue, but not enough positive revenue to compete with subsidized mining of indium. The cost to produce the recycled content could not compete with mined material, even if the energy was a net positive. 

Good Point Recycling continues domestically selling TV parts for reuse, and that non-shredding process will continue to generate tons of these "black glass" liquid crystal display panels. According to the MSDS sheet's I've reviewed, there isn't any hazardous content (though I have cut myself repeatedly when handling them). But everyone in the electronics recycling industry is throwing them away to landfill, directly or indirectly (as shredder fluff, not capturing the rare earth mineral).  

Again, these are just a preview. These are generated from reuse and repair operations.

In emerging markets, they are sometimes used to replace tin roofing tiles. In OECD countries, they are usually just shredded or disposed in landfill.