Looking Down Under for a Circular Economy of Indium

Abstract

Indium is a specialty metal crucial for modern technology, yet it is potentially critical due to its byproduct status in mining. Measures to reduce its criticality typically focus on improving its recycling efficiency at end-of-life. This study quantifies primary and secondary indium resources ("stocks") for Australia through a dynamic material-flow analysis. It is based on detailed assessments of indium mineral resources hosted in lead-zinc and copper deposits, respective mining activities from 1844 to 2013, and the trade of indium-containing products from 1988 to 2015. The results show that Australia's indium stocks are substantial, estimated at 46.2 kt in mineral resources and an additional 14.7 kt in mine wastes. Australian mineral resources alone could meet global demand (∼0.8 kt/year) for more than five decades. Discarded material from post-consumer products, instead, is negligible (43 t). This suggests that the resilience of Australia's indium supply can best be increased through efficiency gains in mining (such as introducing domestic indium refining capacity) rather than at the end of the product life. These findings likely also apply to other specialty metals, such as gallium or germanium, and other resource-dominated countries. Finally, the results illustrate that national circular economy strategies can differ substantially.

Backlighting the European Indium Recycling Potentials

“…), Taiwan (Chang et al. ), the United States (Goonan ), Australia (Werner et al ), and the world (Licht et al. ).…”

“…Spent alkaline batteries: indium concentration (own assumption) based on (Werner et al. ). Other waste: indium concentration (own assumption) based on (Werner et al.…”

Trace Element Distributions in the Zn-Pb (Mississippi Valley-Type) and Cu-Ag (Kupferschiefer) Sediment-Hosted Deposits in Poland

“…These commodities are important components in the manufacturing of modern and green technology, have a wide variety of military applications, and are becoming increasingly important for high-tech applications. Consequently, a number of countries, including USA, UK, Japan, EU, and Australia have commissioned reports on critical commodities (e.g., [7,[9][10][11][12]). Most of these commodities have small restricted markets, and supply is restricted, i.e., concentrated in either a small group of countries or operating companies [12,[86][87][88][89].…”

“…According to numerous studies, the most critical commodities for the EU and Polish economy are rare earths (REE), Nb, and Ta, for which there are no primary and secondary sources in the EU and no possibility of their production [8,9]. Generally, critical raw materials are in short supply [10][11][12] as there are only primary (from deposits) and secondary (recycling) sources for them within the EU, usually with insufficient resources; nevertheless, a demand for them is easily covered to a large extent by imports from countries outside the EU [8]. However, some of these elements are present in large stocks in metal ore deposits in Europe, but they are not recovered in technological processes.…”

A hybrid material flow analysis for quantifying multilevel anthropogenic resources

“…Material flow analysis (MFA) is the core methodology in the area of socioeconomic metabolism (SEM) in industrial ecology (IE), which is based on the law of conservation of mass to systemically analyze the flow of a matter in a defined period and space (Brunner & Rechberger, ). Originally, MFA was developed for investigating the final sink of substances to reduce the derived negative environmental impacts; but recently, it has been widely used to study the distribution of resources in the anthroposphere and in nature for exploring the possibility of transitioning to a circular economy (Bocken, Olivetti, Cullen, Potting, & Lifset, ; Pauliuk, Wang, & Müller, ; Schiller, Müller, & Ortlepp, ; Stephan & Athanassiadis, ; Werner, Ciacci, Mudd, Reck, & Northey, ). Although there is a complete development of equations and indicators for calculating the flows in the system for MFA, it lacks evaluation of NAS in MFA.…”