The United Nations Resource Panel generates reports on various resources and reports on various aspects of those resources. [COUGH] Let me now go on to a second report that was looking specifically at this part of the cycle. Which is material that has been discarded, goes into a recycling center, and comes back into use. So this is called end-of-life recycling rate. Which as you can see, is the fraction e over a. Here's all of that material which is discarded and this is the fraction of it that comes back into service, so that's called the end-of-life recycling rate. The second report that I'm talking about assessed that parameter for all the metals of the periodic table. And this is the result of that activity. Anything in dark blue, which generally are these materials in the center of the periodic table, are being recycled are, we estimate, at greater than 50%. In other words, if you discard a product that contains any of those materials there is a slightly better than even chance that that material will see another use. Then we have some intermediate estimates, these are all estimates because there are not good data available to do this definitively. And there are some that are in the 10 to 20 to 30% range, maybe down to a few percent and those are in the copper color, in the yellow and in the, in the light blue. What dominates this chart are elements that appear in red. For which the assessment was that they are either being completely discarded or only very tiny fractions of them being recycled. So the message coming out of this second report is first, recycling data are very poor. So we can't do more than put the recycling rates into general categories rather than saying 33% instead of 38%. Some loss always occurs in processing and especially in low technology processing which means that recycling can never be complete. But at present, end-of-life recycling rates for many materials are low or near zero and may never be much higher because of all the challenges of recycling often of materials used in small quantities and in many products that are widely dispersed. One aspect of recycling that is sometimes confusing is distinguishing between the terms recycle, recycling rate and recycled content. And, let me speak to that briefly and try to clarify that situation. Here again is the material flow cycle from ore, through the system to waste management, and in the recycling sense, returning to future use. The end-of-life recycling rate is given by taking the amount actually coming back for second use, divided by the amount that is discarded, or e over a. There's also the term in use, recycled content. Which says, of the amount of the material moving from production into fabrication, flow m, what fraction of that has seen, some kind of service before? So, we have a, a flow called prompt scrap. Flow j, which is material that is recovered at fabrication or manufacturing, say as turnings from a lathe or something of that sort. And we also have then the amount that has been through the entire life cycle once and coming back. So recycled content is the product the sum of, of e and j divided by, by m and we have statistics for both of those recycled rate oriented metrics. Here are the estimates of end-of- recycling, end-of-life recycling rates for 60 metals. The dark blue being recycling rates estimated to be greater than 50%. The red being recycling, end-of-life recycling rates estimated to be less than 1%. Usually not at all. This is is end-of-life, now. And a few elements that have intermediate recycling rates. So in general, the ones with high recycling rates are the ones that are either the most widely used metals, this group here, or the precious high-value metals such as palladium, silver, gold and platinum. The metals that are recycled not at all or very seldom are the rare earth metals, here, the solar cell oriented metals, here, some of the specialty metals used in electronics, and elements that see special use in high energy alloys as, as a group. So two messages here for some elements we do pretty well, for a lot of elements we don't do very well for end-of-life recycling rates. Here's recycled content, the fraction of material going into use that was recycled either from end-of-life or from none, the manufacturing process itself. [COUGH] And, here you see that there are only three elements for which it appears that rate is above 50%. Lead, Ruthenium and Niobium. There are a number for which it is negligible. But most elements have some fraction, some reasonable fraction, 10, 20% of end-of-life, recycled not end-of-life but recycled content going forward. Recycled content is something that seems to work well for products like paper, where there's a good recycling stream. And things are easy to measure. And, the technology is very straightforward. For metals, however, we have a situation where over time, flow into use has been increasing, rather steadily. And, it takes a while, once it's gone into use, to come out of use. So if we recovered everything that went into use, the flow from recycling would lag flow into use by the average lifetime, say 10 or 20 years. As long as things are increasing, the flow from recycling is going to be nowhere near the amount needed by the production process. And therefore, no matter how high you specify the desire to get to a higher recycled content, in most cases for metals the material just will not be available because it has been used fairly recently in applications with long lifetimes and by the time that material is available the total flow into use will be much higher than it was before. So that is the distinction between end-of- life recycling rate and recycling content.
