I’ll start by saying that I don’t know anything about this, but I’d still like to spark a discussion about it.
In discussions about electric cars and other clean energy topics, it’s often brought up that panels and similar technologies require many different rare earth metals to function, and a large portion of them are quite rare. Cobalt is one example, and there was just news that Finland has perhaps the most promising deposits in the world.
However, mere mining isn’t enough if the material is sufficiently rare; at some point, recycling inevitably becomes profitable as well. I don’t see why the separation and identification of metals from other waste couldn’t be automated, at least to some extent, with the help of AI, especially if the underprivileged in the third world are currently doing it by hand.
The question is, how can one invest in this? I tried Googling the matter and found some companies, but they weren’t widely listed on the stock exchange. Has anyone else looked into this field and considered these questions?
That thread indeed remained somewhat unfinished because the topic is so broad. On the other hand, there have been very few discussions about these topics here and there, and they get lost in different places. In that sense, even though the thread I created is very broad, it could be justified to write these things there, as there isn’t yet much discussion about them here. Otherwise, some threads here get very little use and then they get lost or forgotten. So perhaps these writings fit into that existing thread, as they mostly focus on the energy industry, or at least the trend is largely there, and the traditional earth metal/mining industry is of course a separate matter; I didn’t intend to mix that in too much (and I don’t particularly know much about it myself, for example).
I’ll try to write a very light scratch-off in the recycling section today, and the idea, of course, was that one can open discussions in that thread and not consolidate everything to the top level.
I’ve now written a surface scratch-off there. I intend to continue soon.
This recycling thing is important, and with the circular economy, it will only increase in the future. With the development of recovery technology, it will become economically viable to recover various metals and so on. Depending on the metal and its price, of course, recovering even smaller amounts of rare metals makes sense.
For example, WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) contains a considerable amount of various and rarer metals such as:
