Steve Nelson on the edge of Vancouver's Chinatown in May of 2021.Christopher Cheung/The Tyee
Vince Beiser is the author of the forthcoming book Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future, to be published on Nov. 19, from which this article is adapted.
Steve Nelson grabs the lip of the dumpster with his thick, calloused fingers, scrambles nimbly up the side, and drops down into the trash inside. He’s 57, and his many years of living on the streets of Vancouver show in his frazzled grey hair, weathered face, and unruly teeth. But he’s otherwise in great shape, sinewy, strong, and full of good cheer. A quick scrounge turns up a few lengths of electrical wire, some small sheets of aluminum, and a big outdoor light fixture. That’s a good find.
“I can take this apart without a tool and make it into money!” Steve crows about the light fixture. He shows me how to remove a small corner piece of metal and use it as an improvised screwdriver to loosen the casing. “Then you just drop it on a corner, and it’ll crack at the welds,” he explains. “The inside will pop out, and you’ve got yourself the copper core.” He figures that copper from the light plus the aluminum will net him about three bucks and change when he sells this haul to a scrapyard. Could be worse.
To most people, Steve’s work is invisible. He goes places most of us never see, trying to acquire objects others are trying to get rid of. But the metal scavenging he and countless others do every day plays an important role in helping to transition the world from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Humanity is facing a brutal paradox. We must switch to renewable energy and electric vehicles to stave off the catastrophes of climate change – but in doing so we may create a whole other set of catastrophes. Renewable power has an Achilles heel: it requires staggering quantities of natural resources, especially metals. Building all the electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels, and power lines we’ll need will take billions of tons of copper, lithium, cobalt and other so-called critical metals. To meet the world’s growing hunger for those materials, rainforests in Indonesia are being cut to the ground. Rivers in South America are being poisoned. Children in central Africa are being put to work in mines. Warlords in Myanmar are getting rich. People in many countries are getting killed. And we’re just getting started. Demand for lithium is expected to increase a hundredfold by 2050. In all of human history, we’ve mined about 700 million tons of copper; we’ll need to mine that amount again in the next 20-odd years.
How, then, can we pull off the energy transition without trashing the planet? Perhaps the most popular answer to that question is a single word: recycling! Everyone from environmental organizations to the Canadian and American governments (at least under their current respective leaderships) is calling for more critical metal recycling. Billions of investment dollars are flowing into North American recycling startups. The mining giant Rio Tinto recently bought a US$700-million stake in the Brampton, Ont.-based recycler Matalco Inc. Its rival Glencore’s recycling unit is expected to contribute US$1-billion to its earnings by the end of the decade.
The concept seems irresistibly virtuous and simple: When you’re finished with a product, break it down to the raw materials it was made from and use them to make a new product. In practice, though, things are far more complicated.
Recycling is easier on the planet than extracting fresh raw materials, but it nonetheless entails heavy costs of its own. Metal recycling is a globe-spanning, multibillion-dollar industry. It involves diesel-burning heavy machinery, smoke-belching smelters, and cargo ships hauling millions of tons of cast-off products across the oceans. It devours huge amounts of energy, spews out pollution, and is often carried out on the backs of the world’s poorest people. And it will never supply all the critical metals we need.
Big scrap dealers buy most of their feedstock in bulk – leftovers from construction sites and industrial facilities or junk from demolitions. But that leaves out the countless tons of miscellaneous scrap scattered throughout millions of offices, small businesses, and homes. All those outdated phones and old charging cables cluttering up your junk drawer, to say nothing of the busted microwave in your garage or that rusty barbecue in the backyard, collectively contain enormous amounts of metals.
In developing countries, door-to-door scrap collecting is a significant industry. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, millions of people are at work every day, shuffling through piles of what others have deemed worthless and pulling out the materials that in fact have value to all of us. These waste pickers, as they’re often called, gather discarded plastic, cardboard, glass, cloth, and metals, collecting volumes too small for big companies to bother with. They provide a tremendous service by keeping junk out of landfills and reducing the need to extract virgin raw materials of all sorts. They are little noticed, badly paid, and often work in appalling conditions, with no safety equipment, or sometimes even shoes, exposed to all kinds of toxic filth. (Some of them are also children.)
In rich countries like Canada, those cast-off electric gadgets typically sit around unused or get thrown in the trash. That’s where scrappers like Steve Nelson comes in.
After Steve shows me his haul, he clambers out from the dumpster’s knee-deep gumbo of heavy plastic trash bags, bits of broken machinery, and cast-off metal miscellany and crams his finds onto a jerry-rigged trailer attached to his bicycle. There’s probably two pounds of copper inside the light fixture he’d taken apart, Steve estimates. He adds it to the metal detritus already piled up on the trailer, lashing it all down with tattered bungee cords. Cargo secured, Steve fires up the boombox affixed to his handlebars and rolls off to his next stop.
Steve sells his dumpster finds to Capital Salvage, a tiny scrapyard tucked in the middle of a non-descript, light-industrial block on Vancouver’s east side. The yard looks like someone filled it by dragging a Wile E. Coyote magnet through a random city block to pull out every metal-bearing object. There are desk chairs, vacuum cleaners, ceiling fans, floor fans, a kid’s scooter, stacks of aluminum siding, a box of rusty saw blades, ice skates, window frames, a spatula. The angry buzz of power saws, the grumbling of a forklift motor, and the clatter of bits of metal getting tossed from one pile to another fills the air.
Capital Salvage, like most businesses that call themselves metal recyclers, doesn’t actually turn old junk into new metal. They are primarily collectors, aggregators – links in a long chain. They process the junk to varying degrees and sort it into piles big enough to sell to other businesses that can take it to the next stage. Places like ABC Recycling, based in a 10-acre lot in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.
“You name it. We deal with steel distributors, mines, the movie industry, equipment suppliers, waste companies, demolition companies, plumbers, electricians, HVAC centres,” explains Randy Kahlon, vice-president for sales.
Recycling is not a silver-bullet solution to the critical metal supply conundrum.Christopher Cheung/The Tyee
The yard itself is like a vast charnel house after the robot Armageddon, strewn with towering piles of twisted, blackened, rusting metal. Humans can be glimpsed here and there atop scurrying forklifts, but most of what’s moving around are enormous machines built to destroy. A machine that looks like a titanic, angry turtle methodically chomps the screeching, groaning steel and aluminum skeleton of a railroad car into pieces. Compressors squash old cars down into lumpy metal pancakes. Cranes wielding four-clawed grapples move snarls of chopped-up rebar from here to there, dropping them with a raucous clamour.
Mr. Kahlon, like just about everyone else in the scrap business, is well aware of the critical-metals boom and is positioning the company to take advantage of it. “The world is going electric, so the world needs more of this stuff, right?” he says. “The demand for recyclers and what we do is only going to intensify.”
Mr. Kahlon’s shop is just another link in the chain. They take in junk, shear or slice or smash it down to manageable sizes, sort it, bale it up, and move it along. Most of ABC’s product gets loaded into containers and shipped overseas to industrial smelters in places like India or China. Only once it reaches those distant places will the scrap be melted down, recast, and U-turned back into the supply chain.
Every ton of metal that gets recycled in this way is a ton that doesn’t have to be dug out of the ground, with all the destruction that entails. But the process isn’t harmless. It generates pollution and climate-changing carbon all along the way. Grinding and shredding up all that scrap throws off particulate matter – metal dust, essentially – that can travel away on a breeze and end up in the lungs of people living nearby. The intense heat involved can also vaporize whatever plastics, paints, sealants, and other cruft are in the scrap, creating more airborne toxins that can infect the water and air of surrounding communities.
The container ships and trucks that move the scrap around, of course, belch out carbon. More is generated by the huge, infernally hot furnaces in which the metal is melted. In China and elsewhere, much of the energy to power those furnaces comes from carbon-spewing coal and natural-gas plants. All told, the carbon emitted per ton of recycled metal is generally less than that of a ton mined from the ground. But it’s far from zero.
On top of all that, recycling is simply inadequate to fill the demand for critical metals. Even if we recycled all the critical metals currently in use around the world, we’d still have to mine more because demand keeps growing. And we’ll never be able to recycle all the metals we use. Some material is always lost in the process. Some is simply ignored by recyclers focusing on the most valuable elements in a given product, such as the cobalt and nickel in batteries. The lithium in those batteries is typically an afterthought; at the moment, the world recycles less than 1 per cent of the lithium it uses. Some metals, like rare earths, are so difficult to recover at scale that we are likely to depend on mining fresh supplies for decades to come.
From the industrialized world to emerging economies, we can and should be recycling more of the critical metals we need for the energy transition. We should be figuring out cleaner, more efficient ways to do it while making sure the people actually doing the work are reasonably protected and fairly paid. And all of that should happen with the lowest carbon emissions possible.
But we also have to recognize that recycling is not a silver-bullet solution to the critical metal supply conundrum. That means we need to think beyond the question of “How can we increase the supply of critical metals?” We need to think more deeply about the demand implied by that question. We need to consider how we can reduce our hunger for critical metals in the first place. The best way to do that is to reduce our consumption of the products made with those metals – everything from electronics to cars. The famous slogan from the 1970s is more relevant than ever: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” The more we do all of those things, the better chance we have of reaching a truly sustainable future.