The International Resource Panel of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has launched the new report “Recycling Rates of Metals” worked out by its Working Group on the Global Metal Flows. The results of the report were presented last week in London by lead author Thomas E. Graedel (Yale University) and on the occasion of the Green Week in Brussels by our colleague Matthias Buchert who is one of the eight authors. Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP’s Executive Director has opened the press conference in Brussels and has underlined the high relevance of the new study and the confirmation that global efforts to enhance recycling rates of metals should be improved in the next years.

The report provides an overview on the current knowledge of recycling rates for sixty metals.

According to this report recycling rates of metals are in many cases far lower than their potential. Out of 60 metals less than one third (aluminium, cobalt, chromium, copper, gold, iron, lead, manganese, niobium, nickel, palladium,  platinum, rhenium, rhodium, silver, tin, titanium, and zinc) has an end-of-life-recycling rate (EOL-RR) above 50%. And more than the half of the metals (34 elements) has an EOL-RR under 1% (e.g. gallium, indium, and neodymium).
Many of these metals are crucial to green technologies such as magnets in electric vehicles or wind turbines or lighting systems.

You can find the full report and the summary booklet on the UNEP-webpage:

http://www.unep.org/resourcepanel/Publications/Recyclingratesofmetals/tabid/56073/Default.aspx

The Brussels presentation of Matthias Buchert is available for download here:

http://www.resourcefever.org/publications/presentations/UNEP_metals20110526-OeI-shortversion.pdf