Comprehensive elemental analysis of consumer electronic devices: Rare earth, precious, and critical elements

Over the past few decades, electronic devices of all kinds, and especially consumer electronics, have evolved in function and composition, in parallel to increasing manufacture and use. There is great potential for recovering economic value and reducing environmental impact by recycling devices and extracting various elements. However, there are few studies that comprehensively identify the elemental content of electronic devices or electronic waste. In the present study, consumer electronics and components (hard drives, ethernet hubs, portable media players, printers, answering machines, mobile phones, Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) players, computer wiring, and printed circuit boards) and electronic waste (low-grade scrap from one commercial recycling facility) were analyzed for rare earth, precious and critical metals. The overall procedure included size reduction, microwave assisted digestion, and Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES) analysis. Fifty-six elements were quantified or detected in these devices: 14 rare earth elements, six platinum group metals, 20 critical metals, and 16 other elements, including some precious metals. A single device could include a wide range of elements: 48 metals were quantified in the computer hard drives. The estimated economic value of the metals in each device ranged from $12.94 USD (computer wiring) to $454 USD (hard drives). The variety of metals in electronic devices suggests that end-of-life management strategies should focus on recycling and recovery, which also decreases the overall environmental impacts of the devices, especially associated with mining and refining metals.