According to the UN, some 62m tonnes of electronic waste were produced in 2022, enough to fill a line of lorries parked bumper-to-bumper around the equator. Only 22% is recycled. Most of the rest ends up in landfills or incinerators, where in 2024 recoverable raw materials worth $63bn went to waste. That figure is expected to grow to more than $80bn by 2030.
Many valuable materials are contaminated when e-waste is crushed during recycling, limiting the effectiveness of specialist extraction techniques. The process becomes more straightforward if products are disassembled and their components sorted by composition before crushing. Copper can be recovered from wiring; gold, silver and other precious metals can be leached from circuit boards, along with cobalt, lithium, manganese and nickel from batteries; rare-earth magnets can be pulled from electric motors.
Disassembly is labour-intensive and costly. Conventional robots are good at putting together a specific item but struggle to recognise and take apart the thousands of different devices that end up in recycling streams.
A new generation of robots powered by artificial-intelligence models is being developed to tackle the problem. Apple uses a system called Daisy which, with the help of AI, can now dismantle more than 20 types of iPhone; a decade ago an early version could handle only one. Microsoft is developing a robot to disassemble computer hard drives, allowing only the data-bearing platters to be crushed while the rest is recycled. ABB, a Swedish-Swiss electrical-engineering company, is working with Molg, an American recycler, on a network of robotic "minifactories" to dismantle electronics from data centres.
José Saenz and his team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation in Magdeburg, Germany, are developing a robotic system flexible enough to dismantle a wide variety of e-waste—from phones to electric-vehicle batteries, LED screens and solar panels. Their AI-assisted robot identifies products using cameras and label scans, determines which components are worth removing, checks the integrity of fasteners, and generates a disassembly sequence. Dr Saenz estimates it could be five years until a commercial multi-purpose disassembly robot is ready for recycling centres.
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