Let’s look at a case commented upon by this newspaper: The global e-waste monitor 2024. I spent a couple of decades of my working life dealing with strange and odd sources of scrap metal. Offcuts from nuclear power plants, strange bits of electronics, the more weird it was the more it was my bread and butter. This report, and most like it, miss out the most important and vital piece of the puzzle.
At one level the report -- and others like it -- is entirely correct. There are varied metals in those scrap electronics. This isn't a huge surprise, the electronics are made of varied metals, those varied metals will still be there when we stop using the electronics.
It's the next level which is incorrect. For we then get told that there's -- in the case of this report -- $60 billion worth of metals which are just being thrown away. Which isn't true in the slightest.
There are metals in the electronics which, if they weren't in the electronics, would be worth $60 billion. But what's the cost of getting those metals out of the electronics? The answer is more than $60 billion. Thus those metals, where they are inside those electronics, have a negative value. It costs more to get them out than they are worth, the overall value is less than zero.
As I say, I have spent years of my life dealing with scrap metal. Adding value by extracting it, moving it around, generally working in the field. It's one of the grand annoyances of that working life that we all know there are metals in electronics. Also, we can't work out how to make a profit from extracting them. Because the costs are higher than the value.
For example, much is made of the fact -- and it is a fact -- that there are rare earths in computers. In the magnets in the hard drives. Ok, but there are a gramme or three in each magnet in each hard drive. A gramme of neodymium (the likely rare earth metal) is worth perhaps $0.004. To get that out you've got to collect the computer, take out the hard drive, hand disassemble the hard drive, pick out the little magnet and even then it's only partly neodymium. You've got to process an awful lot of computers to get a saleable amount. And it will cost more than 0.4 cents (that really is four-tenths of one United States cent) for each computer. Sure, the connectors on the computer boards are plated with gold. But modern plating is perhaps 0.01mm (one tenth of a micrometre) thick. You've got to melt down an awful lot of computers to get to an ounce of gold.
These insistences that we must recycle more, even at a loss, are making a very strange demand
Our basic problem is exactly the same as we've got with mining minerals in the first place. Everything contains a little amount of everything. There's helium in the soil in the garden, iron, aluminium and so on. Yes, gold in the ocean and so on. But there's a simple distinction to be made. If the elements, once extracted, are worth less than the cost of extracting them then this is not ore, this is dirt. Use it for growing cabbages, not as a source of metals. If the value is greater than the costs of getting out then happy days, that's an ore.
Exactly the same is true of scrap. Scrap anything -- if the costs of recycling are greater than the value gained from recycling then don't recycle it. You're just making everyone poorer. If the value's greater then get one with the work then.
All of these reports about the value of metals, or resources, in this or that ignore this basic fact. Only some things are worth recycling. Which is why we have so many bureaucracies writing vast reports insisting that more recycling should be done. The recycling that adds value is already being done -- people like to make a profit after all. That reports have to be written insisting upon more is the very proof we require that this isn't a money-making operation.
This isn't perfectly true but it's very close to being so -- prices are a measure of the resources that must be used to do something. So, these insistences that we must recycle more, even at a loss, are making a very strange demand. That we must waste resources -- the amount of resources wasted is equal to the loss -- in order to save resources. Which is, when you think about it, very strange.
But then it's the product of politics and bureaucracy which explains that silliness perfectly.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.
