including a fourfold increasing in the amount of gold recoveredThe process would also emit 8 less CO 2 as compared to hydrometallurgical processes Improved sorting and recovery of scrap Metals scrap comes in a variety of diferent grades and quality as well as impurities which act as a major cost barrier Economic scrap collection and sorting is k ey Physical sorting of scrap metal is more economical than melt refning technology The most recent new technologies for economic aluminium 221 sorting include eddy current sink foat and more recently sensorbased sorting as well as colour etching then sorting and laser induced break down spectroscopy LIBS Currently the latter option appears to be the most promising high volume high speed process it is currently at demonstration stage Specifcally for endoflifevehicles in today s modern plants 95 of the aluminium in an endoflifevehicle is successfully and proftably reused or recycled into new aluminium products substituting primary aluminium 222 223 Other research and development initiatives for higher and betterquality scrap recovery include adjustable magnetic felds and X rays The University of Utah is developing a light metal sorting system that can distinguish multiple grades of scrap metal using an adjustable and varying magnetic feld Current sorting technologies based on permanent magnets can only separate light metals from ironbased metals and tend to be inefcient and e xpensive The new sorting technology uses an adjustable magnetic feld rather than a permanent magnet to automate scrap sorting which could ofer increased accuracy less energy con sumption lower CO 2 emissions and reduced costs Due to the fe xibility of this design the system could be set to sort for any one metal at a time rather than being limited to sorting for a specifc metal Similarly a US company 224 is developing a sorting technology that uses X rays to distinguish between highvalue metal alloys found in the scrap of many shapes and sizes Existing identifcation technologies rely on manual sorting of light metals which can be inaccurate and slow The system will rapidly sort scrap metal passed over a convey er belt making it possible to lower metals waste while simultaneously increasing the quality of recycled metal alloys By analyzing the light emitted from X rayed metal pieces the probe is able to identify alloy compositions for automated sorting A utomating this process would signifcantly reduce the costs associated with recycling light metal scrap 225 221 Secondary aluminium production uses far less energy than primary aluminium production process the electricity u se per tonne aluminium produced is 0 120 34 MWht compared to around 1416 MWh for primary which is around 5 of the energy use from primary production Around half of the aluminium produced in Europe originates from recycled materials with recycling levels of 9095 percent for endoflife vehicles and building parts and over 73 percent for beverage cans For all these reasons aluminium is a k ey material for the Circular Economy with an enormous decarbonization potential stemming from its circular properties Source European Aluminium 222 European Aluminium 2019 223 Fraunhofer ISI 2019 224 UHV T echnologies 225 ARP AE ND a and ARP AE ND b Furthermore it will be an R D challenge to get higher metal e xtraction rates for some processes and achieve high levels of selective recovery R ecovery of metals from waste electrical and electronic equipment WEEE W aste from electrical and electronic equipment WEEE contains considerable quantities of valuable metals such as base metals e g copper precious metals and rare earth elements Current state of the art of WEEE recycling is limited to pyrometallurgical and to a smaller e xtent hydrometallurgical approaches Currently a number of smelting facilities historically primary ore smelters also process WEEE for metal recovery Pyrometallurgical metal recovery from WEEE happens through incinerating the waste material in furnaces 216 This process can be followed by copper leaching and electrowinning 217 The pyrometallurgical process is capitalin tensive and is CO 2 intensive due to the high carbon content of some of the waste Emissions from burning of the WEEE in the process to recover metals can be reduced through the use of pyrolytic processes i e heating in the absence of o xygen 218 This results in pyrolytic gas oil and solid carbon residues The pyrolytic gas and oil can be used as fuel in the process so no or limited additional fuels would be required The solid carbon residue can be used as additive to construction materials or used as a reducing agent in pyrometal lurgical processes A full hydrometallurgical process in which shredded WEEE is not incinerated but dissolved in an acidic solution followed by metal recovery through electrodisposition can have a lower energy and CO 2 footprint R esearch at Imperial College L ondon has demonstrated the feasibility of removing a high percentage of both the hazardous and valuable metals from electronic scrap at low cost 219 Finally advances in bioleaching bacterialbased leaching of metals could further reduce the costs of recovering gold silver copper and platinum from printed circuit boards found in electrical and electronic waste A new twostage bioleaching process is currently being researched in the EU This new solution is e xpected to reduce energy consumption and processing costs in comparison to other treatment processes pyrometallurgy hydrometal lurgy onestep bioleaching It will also mak e use of available waste from other industries food and animal feed as an additional nutrientbooster for microorganisms 220 The goal is to come to a 50 reduction in metal recovery costs as compared to hydrometallurgical pro cesses and 3540 compared to onestep bioleaching and to 75100 of metal recovered 216 Isildar A 2018 217 Umicore 218 Ecocarbon 219 Cheng et al ND Estimated electrical energy cost of recovering metals from solution is about 250 GBP per tonn e of scrap with a metal value of over 2000 GBP per tonne of scrap 220 The LIFE BIO T A WEE project running from July 2018 to December 2020 MET ALS IN A CLIMA TE NEUTRAL EUROPE A 2050 BL UEPRINT 59