Written by/Reporter Zhao Tianyu Photo Editor/Chen Yongjie
New Media Editor/Lai Tianying
Interview experts
Lv Bin (Researcher, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Kan Kaili (Professor, Institute of Information Industry Development, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications)
At the just-concluded National Two Sessions, Lei Jun, a deputy to the National People's Congress and chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group, suggested in the proposal that while formulating a medium- and long-term overall development plan for the recycling of electronic waste, the state should avoid the leakage of personal information by equipment such as waste mobile phones, improve the recycling rate of electronic waste waste; and carry out personal carbon credit pilots to promote the participation of the whole people.
▲China's used mobile phone stock has accumulated more than 2 billion units (Source: Visual China)
When it comes to e-waste recycling, the stock is the highest, and the most closely related to the general public is the mobile phone. According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the total number of mobile phone users of the three basic telecommunications companies in the mainland reached 1.6 billion. In total, China generated about 524 million used mobile phones in 2020. Since 2014, China's used mobile phone stock has exceeded 2 billion.
China is not only the world's largest producer and consumer of mobile phones, but also the world's largest producer of used mobile phones.
Where does the soul return to the old mobile phone? The scrap volume of up to 500 million yuan and the stock of more than 2 billion yuan mean that whether it is possible to properly dispose of waste mobile phones while handling the privacy and security of users, and reasonably integrate them into the circular economy system, has become a major problem that must be faced in the process of promoting carbon neutrality strategy.
Gold on the left pollution on the right
Compared with the hesitation of buying mobile phones, many people are very decisive when abandoning old mobile phones, do not care about the way of mobile phones, or simply choose "idle" and become abandoned "electronic garbage".
In fact, the waste mobile phone is a treasure, with a high recycling value, it is necessary to recycle; but at the same time, the waste mobile phone is also a "big household" of environmental pollution, so it must be recycled.
"Mobile phones are essentially electronic products, chemical products, and parts contain harmful substances such as lead, cadmium, and mercury." Lu Bin, a researcher at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that if the old mobile phone is simply discarded, it will cause damage to the environment.
"A waste mobile phone battery can pollute 60,000 liters of water, its pollution intensity is 100 times that of ordinary dry batteries, lead, cadmium, mercury and other substances can penetrate the soil, affecting the water quality of groundwater." Lu Bin said.
There have been media reports that the world's largest e-waste dump in Ghana, Africa, has more than 5 million tons of various types of waste electronic products every year, and after manual "dismemberment" by more than 40,000 surrounding farmers, it is incinerated and landfilled, which not only releases a large amount of poisonous gas, but also destroys the groundwater.
▲ The world's largest e-waste dump in Ghana, Africa, with more than 5 million tons of various types of waste electronic products every year (Image source: Visual China)
While the harmful minerals exceed the standard, the precious metal content of the waste mobile phone is not low, and even higher than the gold and silver ore of the same quality, which profoundly explains what is called "gold will always shine".
It is understood that before 2015, non-smart phones, the gold content of electronic waste is 60 to 100 times that of the same quality ore, and about 400 grams of gold, 2300 grams of silver and 172 grams of copper can be extracted from 1 ton of waste mobile phones; compared with mining 1 ton of gold sand, only about 5 grams of gold can be extracted.
▲Chemical elements in mobile phones (Image source: Popular Science China)
Guiyu Town, Shantou, Guangdong, once known as the capital of China's waste electronic appliances, can extract no less than 15 tons of gold a year in 2014, accounting for about 5% of the mainland's annual gold production; postponed to the Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021, 5,000 medals are made of metal extracted from 80,000 tons of waste electronic products donated by the Japanese people, including 5 million old mobile phones.
However, Lu Bin frankly said: "In the past, the metal of the old Nokia mobile phone was very large, and now with the improvement of industry, the manufacturing cost of the mobile phone has actually been compressed, and the profit saved has been used for chips and screens, so now the precious metal content in the mobile phone, especially the content of gold, is declining year by year, far from reaching the level of refining 400 grams of gold." ”
Although the precious metal content has declined, the density of lithium batteries is getting higher and higher. The lithium batteries of waste mobile phones also contain lithium, cobalt and nickel elements, which are not chicken ribs.
The data shows that the recovery value of metal cobalt in waste lithium batteries in 2021 will be as high as 996 million yuan; the recovery value of lithium metal is small, but it can also reach about 317 million yuan. It can increase the supply source of some materials in China, has a good economy, and the recycling value is also very high.
Recycling of used machines from dismantling to selling
How to recycle old mobile phones? Many people will think of the small stalls holding signs to recycle mobile phones on the side of the road, or the loudspeaker shouting "old mobile phones for stainless steel basins" in the village market.
But those scenes have all become a thing of the past. With the development of the times and the improvement of ecological environment cognition, the mobile phone recycling industry has gradually completed the transformation from "demolition-oriented" to "sell-oriented", and major mobile phone manufacturers are constantly improving the old-for-new and recycling services.
A staff member who has been engaged in the mobile phone recycling industry for many years told reporters that second-hand mobile phones generally have four circulation channels: secondary sales, export to foreign countries, dismantling parts and refining metals.
Secondary sales of products, after quality inspection and appearance treatment, will be in the relevant Internet platforms such as transfer, love recycling, salted fish for secondary sales, or directly sold to retail wholesalers offline transactions. Some new machines are very cost-effective and have been recognized and even sought after by the market.
The "2020 Second-hand 3C Consumption Annual Report" shows that the current scale of the mainland 3C digital product recycling market has exceeded 100 billion yuan, which is equivalent to the total ANNUAL GDP of Tongzhou District in Beijing. Many domestic platforms specializing in second-hand mobile phone recycling, such as love recycling, turning around, etc., have developed rapidly, and even some companies have gone overseas and listed, and the business has been done all over the world. Some second-hand idle item trading platforms such as Idle Fish also have many individual users who are quite active.
In addition to the circulation and sales in the domestic market, a considerable number of second-hand mobile phones are also exported to developing countries and regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia. For example, the highest shipment volume in Africa is 1GB storage + 8GB memory, 2GB storage + 16GB memory, 3GB storage + 32GB memory of smart phones, the retail price of less than 500 yuan can meet the demand.
▲ Africa has become the best dumping place for second-hand mobile phones (Image source: Visual China)
It is said that in the pre-epidemic Shenzhen Huaqiang Beifeiyang market, there are a large number of sellers from Africa, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Iran and other countries looking for second-hand mobile phones, and even sales personnel in some countries "almost do not look at the price when taking goods", which shows that domestic second-hand mobile phones are full of attractiveness and foreign market space is huge.
Some of the old mobile phones are badly damaged and have lost their maintenance value, but the parts in the mobile phones still need to be disassembled. They are broken down into motherboards, screens, batteries, cameras, memory, and so on. Lü Bin said that these parts are often reused twice, some will be sent to the mobile phone assembly plant to assemble into a new mobile phone, and some are sold in the form of parts, such as mobile phone memory, chips, etc.
The second-hand "corpse" after the parts have been split, and a part of the old mobile phone with extremely low recycling value, will be used to refine heavy metals. Mobile phone manufacturers usually cover a few microns of gold at various interfaces on the mobile phone motherboard to improve conductivity. However, the structure of the mobile phone motherboard is more complicated, and even leads to the fact that there is basically no automatic motherboard disassembly technology now, so the general practice is to disassemble it manually and then use hydrometallurgy to extract it.
Taking the data provided by Love Recycling as an example, 20% to 30% of the mobile phones received will be degraded by environmental protection, 60% will flow to offline recyclers through auctions, and 15% to 20% of mobile phones will be used for resale.
Normative treatment is imminent
According to the "Global E-waste Monitoring Report 2020" released by the United Nations University, the National Telecommunication Union and the International Solid Waste Association, the annual e-waste disposal volume in the mainland has reached about 80 million tons at this stage, and the standardized recycling rate is less than 20%, while Europe has reached 42.5%.
In the classification of mobile phones, the recovery rate has plummeted to 2%. In 2020, the number of waste mobile phones generated by the mainland is about 500 million, and according to this proportion, only 10 million mobile phones have been formally recycled. The remaining more than 400 million mobile phones have either been stored idle at home by users or disposed of in an environmentally friendly and non-compliant manner, resulting in a serious waste of resources.
▲Guiyu Town, Shantou, Guangdong, the former capital of China's waste electronic appliances (Source: Visual China)
Du Huanzheng, director of the Institute of Circular Economy of Tongji University, believes that the low-cost recycling of electronic waste is a problem that has not yet been solved, affecting the overall development of the industry. He suggested that at the beginning of product design, production and recycling links should be taken into account, such as relatively easy disassembly and recycling; in the production process, as little as possible to add toxic and harmful substances or use alternative solutions, etc., and finally achieve low-cost recycling of e-waste.
In Lü Bin's view, there are many reasons for this phenomenon, but the policy is always an important factor, and it is necessary for the relevant departments to strengthen their support for the mobile phone recycling industry.
He explained that mobile phones were included in the "Waste Electrical and Electronic Products Disposal Catalogue" as early as 2014, and that this catalogue corresponds to the "Administrative Measures for the Collection and Use of Waste Electrical and Electronic Products Disposal Funds", which is the specific subsidy measures of the state for the disposal of waste electronic products.
"Over the years, the subsidy policy has been adjusted many times, but the detailed rules for mobile phones have not been introduced," Lu Bin said, which means that enterprises involved in mobile phone recycling have been in a state of zero subsidies, which is in stark contrast to electronic products such as refrigerators and home appliances, and it is easy to limit the enthusiasm and enthusiasm of participants.
Taking the industry's leading enterprise Love Recycling as an example, although the gross profit margin increased from 14.1% in 2018 to 25.7% in 2020, the company's loss increased from 210 million yuan in 2018 to 470 million yuan in 2020, and the cumulative loss in three years was 1.38 billion, and there was a revenue inversion.
That is to say, although the love recovery step is very large, it actually does not make any money, and even the more it loses, the more it loses.
▲The leading enterprise in the industry of waste mobile phone recycling - love recycling (Image source: Visual China)
In addition to environmental protection and policies, the fear of privacy and security leakage has also "forced" many consumers to choose to leave second-hand mobile phones idle.
Kan Kaili, a professor at the Information Industry Development Institute of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, believes that this concern is real: "After restoring the factory settings, consumers cannot ensure that personal information is completely erased." The unique identification code of the mobile phone, the IMEI code, can also be bound with personal payment accounts such as Alipay, WeChat, etc. from the technical theory, and there is a risk of privacy leakage and even property loss. ”
To solve these problems, Kan Kaili suggested that in line with the principle of "who sells who is responsible", advocate manufacturers to recycle second-hand mobile phones and use brand credibility to eliminate consumers' doubts; at the same time, the relevant departments should seriously study and introduce laws and regulations applicable to the recycling and circulation of second-hand mobile phones as soon as possible, strictly implement the regulations, and strengthen supervision and supervision, and finally form an "industry standard" with high binding force.
Producer: Popular Science Central Kitchen
Producer: Beijing Science and Technology News | Beike Media
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