E-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. The UK disposes of more than 100 000 tonnes of electrical goods every year and has over 800 million unused, unwanted and discarded electricals stashed away in homes. These electricals contain technology metals, such as lithium and the ‘rare earth elements’ (REEs), and precious metals, including gold, that are currently thrown away but, according to Material Focus research, are estimated to be worth a staggering £1 billion.

Significant carbon savings can be achieved by recycling electric motors and batteries from small appliances and other waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). Recovery of REEs and other technology metals plays a key role in improving the security of supply and significantly reducing the environmental effects of primary production.

Currently, there is limited data on where these metals are disposed of and recycled; however, over the next year, BGS ‘Mapping technology metals in electricals’ project will generate new data that will reveal the amount of potentially recoverable technology metals in WEEE products, including everyday items such as cordless vacuum cleaners, e-bikes and e-scooters. The analysis will focus on two key components found in these electronic devices: the battery and the motor.

The project will undertake detailed modelling to quantify the amount of technology metals commonly found in electrical items, therefore highlighting the potential for recovering them. For example, neodymium, a REE found in the magnets used in motors, and lithium, which is used in batteries, are both found in everyday electrical items such as e-scooters and vacuum cleaners. Data produced from this project can be used to inform business models and support investment decisions for expanding UK capabilities to recover the value of technology metals in WEEE products.

Although there is some brilliant innovation already happening, many new products still aren’t designed to be easily re-used, recycled or repaired, and we lack the systems to recover all the valuable materials inside them.

We are delighted to be announcing the first of the recipients of our new £1million Circular Electricals Fund, which will help drive innovation and support the development of a more circular electricals system in the UK. These ambitious projects aim to reduce the environmental impact of electricals by improving product design and resource efficiency, and encouraging collaboration.

Scott Butler, executive director, Material Focus.

We are delighted to have been awarded Material Focus funding to investigate the use of technology metals in everyday electrical items across their whole life, from first manufacture, through use and final disposal. We hope the outputs from this work will lead to the development of new circular business models and create commercial opportunities for recovering these valuable metals from end-of-life electrical items.

Richard Shaw, senior mineral commodity geologist, BGS.

Once complete, the report will be publicly available through the and the .

Wind energy has seen a significant rise across the UK over the last 30 years, playing a crucial role in decarbonisation and increasing security around our energy supply. Within the next five years, the UK aims to install up to 50 GW from offshore wind deployment alone, more than three times that which is currently installed (16 GW). This target is driving demand for the critical materials required to produce wind turbines, with technology metals, such as the rare earth elements, playing a major role.

A created by BGS highlights the growth of wind farm deployment across the UK over time, alongside the change in power generation capacity, the wind farms’ expected life spans and their rare earth element and magnet content. The tool is hosted by the , providing information about technology metals and the circular economy approach for ‘green’ technologies such as wind turbines and electric vehicles.

Wind turbines are expected to reach their end-of-life at approximately 25 years. The new tool also estimates when this is likely to be for each site, highlighting when the wind turbines are likely to become available for re-use, refurbishment, remanufacture or recycling.

Accurate data on magnet and rare earth element content in wind turbines is essential for unlocking circular economy opportunities, enabling the recovery of high-value materials and supporting more sustainable business models.

We are pleased to launch this innovative new map viewer, which provides key insights into wind energy installations across the UK including the installed capacity and the rare earth element and magnet content.

We hope that the tool helps increase the understanding of critical minerals in wind farms and the resources they contain. In order to improve the circular economy, we need to better understand the material stocks in our wind farms and their lifetime to plan for their re-use or recycling when they reach end-of-life. As the UK is currently highly dependant on imports of rare earth elements and rare earth permanent magnets, secondary resources from end-of-life wind turbines can boost the UK supply in the future.

Stefan Horn, minerals commodity analyst at BGS and the lead developer for the new tool.

The map was created as part of an Innovate UK CLIMATES project and was co-funded by Met4Tech.

Our future resources are not only in the minerals below the ground but also in the materials we are already using. Mapping and understanding our above-ground resources, as BGS has done in this excellent map, is essential to give us the circular economy we need for a lower carbon world.

Frances Wall, principal investigator, 51ÁÔÆæ Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre for Technology Metals (Met4Tech).

Critical minerals are a group of natural resources that are essential to modern society and increasingly in demand for their use in a wide range of industries, including electronics, renewable energy and transportation. They are considered ‘critical’ because despite their economic and technological importance they are in limited supply for varied technological and economic reasons, often produced in small quantities with supply possibly concentrated in few countries, which can lead to supply chain vulnerabilities and geopolitical tensions. In most cases, the issue of critical raw materials is not geological abundance but geopolitical and economical. 

The issue of critical minerals 

Critical minerals are an issue that has moved up the political agenda in recent years. In 2022, the UK produced its Critical Minerals Strategy, which sets out how the UK will go about securing its supply of critical minerals. The strategy contains three main aims:   

• accelerate the growth of UK capabilities in the procurement, use and circular economy of critical minerals  
• collaborate with international partners  
• enhance international markets  

The Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre (CMIC), which is hosted by BGS, was established to support the realisation of this strategy. CMIC works with universities as well as private and public sector partners to gather and analyse intelligence on the supply and demand of critical minerals, their global value chains and their use by UK industry.  

Research and innovation will play a key role in dealing with the issues raised by critical minerals. This includes, for example, research into and development of:   

• novel physical or chemical extraction and processing techniques, to create new sources of primary raw materials and improve the economic performance of current deposits  
• novel recycling and processing techniques, to establish new sources of secondary materials and reduce the reliance on imported primary materials  
• material synthesis, product design and manufacturing methods, to reduce the reliance on critical minerals and allow diversification  
• technologies for tracking carbon emissions and material stocks and flows, to improve supply chain transparency and integrity  
• environmental sustainability assessment methodologies, to allow financial institutions to have greater confidence in the impacts of their investments  

To understand how best to deploy present and future research and development resources against critical mineral challenges, we need to understand the current situation and how it relates to critical minerals.  

The research review 

The critical minerals research review documented large research projects and programmes (from 2017 onwards) that are relevant to the eighteen raw materials designated as ‘critical’, plus another five on a ‘watchlist’. It also reviewed relevant research institutes and centres, public and industry bodies, and learned societies. The projects and programmes were categorised in terms of technology application, research area and industry sector, then analysed to generate some key statistics and insights.  

In total, the review detailed £1.45 billion of funding. Of this, £0.9 billion was delivered through 51ÁÔÆæ challenge programmes (for example, Faraday; Driving the Electric Revolution (DER); Transforming Foundation Industries; Medicine Manufacturing Challenge), which are largely business-led initiatives in the natural sciences.  

Academic-led investments (approximately £0.4 billion) both complemented the 51ÁÔÆæ challenge programme priorities (Faraday Institute; DER industrialisation centres) and targeted adjacent priority areas set by other research councils ( (EPSRC); (BBSRC); (NERC), etc.). These priority areas include: 

• catalysis, exploration and extraction research 
• fundamental advanced materials research and development 
• green chemistry 
• sustainability  
• circular economy 

Only £153 million of projects in the dataset specifically addressed underlying issues of criticality or were directly relevant to particular elements or minerals. Of the directly relevant funding, the top three elements and minerals targeted are:  

• silicon (around £35 million) 
• lithium (around £25 million)  
• rare earth elements or REEs (around £25 millions) 

Most of the funding for research into REEs has come very recently from the Circular Critical Materials Supply Chain (CLIMATES) programme from . Whilst it should be no surprise to see a battery element (lithium) and the set of metals needed to make high-performance permanent magnets (REEs) in the top three, in general there is a poor correlation between the recent, targeted investment and the criticality score given in the UK Critical Minerals Strategy. In other words, there are minerals deemed to be critical that have historically received little attention or research and development investment.  

Funding relevant to critical minerals is generally delivered by multiple research councils and government departments, including:  

• Innovate UK 
• EPSRC 
• BBSRC 
• NERC 
• (ESRC) 
• (DBT)  
•  

This distributed approach may be diluting the impact of funded research and providing a complicated funding landscape for researchers and businesses to navigate.  

Outcomes and next steps 

It is clear from the review that the UK has significant strengths in multiple research areas relevant to critical minerals, including:  

• exploration and extraction 
• materials science 
• (bio)chemical engineering 
• advanced manufacturing 
• supply chain digitalisation  
• environmental, social and governance (ESG)-compliant financing 

However, significant future investment is required on a multidisciplinary basis, to address major challenges around security of supply of critical minerals for the UK economy. Building on previous investments, these new investments should aim to develop appropriate criticality mitigation strategies to increase UK resilience across critical mineral value chains relevant to multiple applications.   

To provide interdisciplinary solutions that can be easily translated into impact for decision makers in government and industry, integrated research and innovation is needed across three key areas:  

• responsible acquisition and processing of raw materials  
• building resilient, secure and productive supply chains 
• identifying alternative materials, manufacturing technologies and business models to achieve a circular economy 

Critical minerals will become increasingly important over the coming decades as we deploy renewable energy and sustainable transportation and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Investing in critical minerals research and development will contribute to the successful implementation of these changes and allow the UK to lead in the creation of the future green economy.  

About the author

Matthew Reeves, Innovate UK

Rapidly increasing demand for sand in many countries, combined with little or no governance, has resulted in sand mining causing wide ranging negative environmental and economic impacts. This is driven by the increasing demand for concrete due to urban growth and the need for good-quality housing and infrastructure in many parts of the world. BGS is working on geoscience-led solutions to this problem as part of the International Geoscience Research and Development (IGRD) project. We covered how we are going about this in our first blog, Living in a world made of sand.

To enable the public, researchers, geological surveys, regulators, industry and consumers to understand the issues around sand mining, the BGS project team worked with , a freelance illustrator, to create images that capture the current situation and potential solutions. These aim to show how geoscience data and information can be used for the monitoring and management of sand resources.

The current situation

In many countries, large-scale extraction of sand from rivers and the nearshore environment causes:

• increased erosion of banks and beaches
• damage to infrastructure
• harm to water quality, farmland and biodiversity
• increased risk of flooding

Sand supply is often inadequate to meet future needs, causing price fluctuations and stockpiling. There is little or no consideration by the consumer of where this essential building raw material comes from, no transparency in the supply chain, and no linkage between urban planning and those with responsibility for managing sand resources. in many places this is a supply system that is either breaking down or has effectively already broken down, in many places.

In the following illustrations, we show examples of good practice that could be considered to help break out of this unsustainable scenario.

Monitoring

The initial steps in controlling extraction and increasing supply from more sustainable sources are:

• better understanding of how much sand there is
• understanding how much sand is being produced
• knowing where the sand comes from
• knowing where the sand is used

Traditionally, surveys of the sand industry by regulatory authorities are a key source of data. Instead of surveying, which can be expensive, time consuming and require a strong regulatory regime, the sand team at BGS has been using , a more accessible, alternative, way to monitor the activities of the sand industry.

Recycling

Moving towards a circular economy is a key part of any solution to reduce the environmental impact of natural resource consumption. Enabling a circular economy requires a clear understanding of the material supply chain as well as collaboration between planners, consumers and producers. Utilisation of construction, excavation and demolition waste (often referred to as CDEW) may be a viable alternative to natural sand, as may recycling of other products, such as crushed glass. Re-use of modular building material may also help reduce the demand for natural sand.

Use of alternative primary materials

One of the main alternatives to natural sand is ‘manufactured sand’, which is produced from the crushing of hard rocks. This can be a primary product or a by-product from mine (sometimes known as ore sand) and quarry waste. Manufactured sand has similar physical and chemical properties to natural sand. It is also easier to manage the environmental effects from quarry sites, which are often located far from the sensitive environments where river and beach sand is found. However, consideration needs to be given to the increased energy often required to produce manufactured sand.

Sourcing of natural sands

Mining of natural sand should be targeted at ‘fossil’ or geological deposits formed from the sediments of ancient river systems or offshore environments. These can be located well away from active water courses, beaches and marine environments. Extraction needs to be carefully regulated; one way of achieving this is to implement tax or royalties to ensure local administrations take an active interest in extraction and the sand resource is valued.

Reduction of use

Reducing demand for, and therefore consumption of, sand will help to alleviate the pressure on sensitive environments. Reducing the use of concrete is one way to reduce our reliance on sand.

There are many ways to reduce the use of concrete. In some applications, timber may be a sustainable alternative; increased use of steel and glass in construction may also reduce demand for concrete. Reduction can also be achieved by smarter design. For instance, reducing the size of floor spans or constructing smaller buildings helps to reduce material consumption.

Using these illustrations

All illustrations are available to re-use for non-commercial purposes relating to the promotion of good practice for sand mining provided the source is acknowledged and the copyright notice accompanying the illustration is retained.

High-resolution versions of the images are available to download.

About the authors

51ÁÔÆæ expertise will contribute to the development of two new 51ÁÔÆæ-funded Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centres:

• Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre in Technology Metals
• Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre for Mineral-based Construction Materials

They are part of five new centres announced on 11 November as part of a £22.5 million Government investment to explore how closing the loop for materials in the textiles, construction, chemical and metal industries can deliver huge environmental benefits and boost the UK economy.

The UK Research and Innovation (51ÁÔÆæ) will help the UK move towards a circular economy, which will provide significant benefits by:

• reducing waste
• lowering the environmental impact of production and consumption in the UK and abroad
• securing supply for critical raw materials
• creating opportunities for new UK industries

The Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre in Technology Metals will be led by the University of Exeter and is designed to revolutionise how critical metals are extracted, used and reused in low-carbon and digital technologies across the UK.

As part of this centre, BGS will be responsible for the development of a Circular Economy National Virtual Data Observatory (NVO) to deliver stocks and flows data and information for a range of technology metals. It will form a key part of the centre work to explore ways to create a circular economy for the technology metals such as cobalt, rare earths and lithium, essential for low-carbon and digital technologies such as electric cars and wind turbines.

We are very excited to be given the opportunity to develop this National Virtual Data Observatory (NVO) in the UK, which will bridge the data gap about the whole cycle of technology metals.

The geoscience community has a wide range of tools, methods and skills that are transferable to the challenges of the circular economy.

Dr Evi Petavratzi, BGS Mineral Commodity Expert.

The centre aims to develop a new cycle, right from the first stages of extraction, to enable secure and environmentally-acceptable circulation of these materials within the UK economy.

It will bring together experts from the University of Exeter and the Camborne School of Mines, the Universities of Birmingham, Manchester, Leicester and BGS, as well as 40 partner companies and organisations.

The Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre for Mineral-based Construction Materials will be led by University College London and aims to develop systems for more efficient use and recovery of mineral resources in the UK’s construction sector.