Re: efficiency of recycling, there's an interesting paper focusing on the efficiency of precious metals recovery during e-waste recycling:
Assessment of Precious Metal Flows During Preprocessing of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment -- Chancerel, Meskers, Hagelüken, Rotter [1].
Here's my summary of the categorisation by mass of 1000 kg of input e-waste (ignoring the uncertainty quantification in the paper):
Category Mass (kg)
------------------------------
Aluminium 22.0
Copper-rich 122.3
Ferrous metals 331.7
Non-Ferrous metals 4.3
Other * 146.4
PCBs 31.6
Plastics 264.8
Precious-metals-rich 52.8
Rubbish, filter dust 24.0
Total 999.9
(*) "Other" includes wood, hazardous materials, etc.
This paper focuses on the efficiency of the process in recovering precious metals, which would be of interest from an economic perspective to anyone operating the recycling and recover process:
> From the point of view of the process operators, the results of the test can be qualified as “disappointing” because only about a quarter of the gold and palladium and a tenth of the silver are sent to output fractions from which precious metals will be directly recovered. Compared with the recovery rates of major elements such as iron, aluminum, and copper, the recovery rates for precious metals are very low. Most of the precious metals go to the most mass‐relevant fractions (plastics and ferrous metals). These fractions have relatively low concentrations of precious metals (24 g/t of gold and 8 g/t of palladium in the plastics, 24 g/t of gold and 5 g/t of palladium in the ferrous metals; [...] but the considerable mass of the outputs makes the flows of precious metals very relevant.
There are of course other ways to measure the efficiency of a recycling process -- you could focus on energy efficiency, resource efficiency, pollution, etc.
Assessment of Precious Metal Flows During Preprocessing of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment -- Chancerel, Meskers, Hagelüken, Rotter [1].
Here's my summary of the categorisation by mass of 1000 kg of input e-waste (ignoring the uncertainty quantification in the paper):
(*) "Other" includes wood, hazardous materials, etc.This paper focuses on the efficiency of the process in recovering precious metals, which would be of interest from an economic perspective to anyone operating the recycling and recover process:
> From the point of view of the process operators, the results of the test can be qualified as “disappointing” because only about a quarter of the gold and palladium and a tenth of the silver are sent to output fractions from which precious metals will be directly recovered. Compared with the recovery rates of major elements such as iron, aluminum, and copper, the recovery rates for precious metals are very low. Most of the precious metals go to the most mass‐relevant fractions (plastics and ferrous metals). These fractions have relatively low concentrations of precious metals (24 g/t of gold and 8 g/t of palladium in the plastics, 24 g/t of gold and 5 g/t of palladium in the ferrous metals; [...] but the considerable mass of the outputs makes the flows of precious metals very relevant.
There are of course other ways to measure the efficiency of a recycling process -- you could focus on energy efficiency, resource efficiency, pollution, etc.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1530-9290...