Date:
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Time:
8:30 a.m. to 12:20 p.m.
Location:
Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, Room 007C
Sponsored by:
TMS Extraction and Processing Division, TMS Light Metals Division, TMS Recycling and Environmental Technologies Committee
Organizers:
Gabrielle Gaustad, Alfred University; Camille Fleuriault, Gopher Resource; Mertol Gökelma, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; John Howarter, Purdue University; Randolph Kirchain, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Kaka Ma, Colorado State University; Christina Meskers, Umicore; Neale Neelameggham, IND LLC; Elsa Olivetti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Adam Powell, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Fiseha Tesfaye, Åbo Akademi University; Mingming Zhang, ArcelorMittal Global R&D
The plenary session of the REWAS 2019 symposium will feature seven invited speakers.
Featured Speakers:
Toru Okabe, University of Tokyo
Presentation Title: "Recycling of Critical Metals"
About the Presentation
In this talk, the current status of recycling of critical metals (or rare metals) will be reviewed, and the related processing technologies will be introduced. Specifically, recent research on the recycling of titanium, rhenium, and some other precious metals will be introduced. The possibility of next-generation technologies for the recycling of critical metals will also be discussed from a multilateral perspective. Further, recent progress in the refining and recycling processes of titanium and other critical metals will be discussed. If time permits, possible applications of recycling techniques developed by the authors, especially for titanium recycling, in practical industrial processes will also be discussed.
Ben Jones, CRU International Limited
Presentation Title: "Supply Chains for Battery Materials"
About the Presentation
Greening of the global economy—including mass marketization of electric vehicles and the deeper integration of non-dispatchable renewable power technologies—will require massive investment in battery storage capacity. The production of key battery cell components (e.g. cathode, anode, and separators) requires a diverse range of metal and mineral production inputs including lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, aluminum, vanadium, lead, and graphite. This presentation will provide an overview of the key market, commercial, policy, and technological issues affecting current and future supply chain conditions. Specifically, it will discuss and contextualize the demand outlook for these key metals as a function of both the prospective battery revolution but also wider metals market drivers. It will subsequently detail the supply and production cost environments for these key raw materials, drawing insights on the implications of potential future cost inflation for the commercial viability of key battery technologies. Finally, it will discuss insights from a pioneering framework for assessing potential procurement and supply chain disruption in these raw material markets capturing detailed assessments of demand, supply, trade, technology, and politically related risk factors, and draw insights on the implications for industrial structures, contracting arrangements, and the financialization of commodity markets.
About the Presenter
Sarah Kleinbaum is the Technology Manager for Joining of Dissimilar Materials in the Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technology Office. In this role, she assesses the challenges facing the automotive industry to implement lightweight materials in vehicles and sponsors technical research projects including academia, national laboratory, and industry partners to address those challenges. Kleinbaum also serves as co-director of the LightMAT consortium which seeks to enhance the collaboration between industry and national labs in order to accelerate the development and implementation of lightweight automotive materials. Prior to her work at the Department of Energy, Kleinbaum managed the Materials Analysis and Approval Laboratory for North America at Whirlpool Corp. She received both her Masters of Science and Bachelor’s degrees in Materials Engineering from Purdue University.
Callie Babbitt, Rochester Institute of Technology
Presentation Title: "Implications of an Evolving Electronic Waste Stream"
About the Presentation
Electronic waste is a critical environmental issue, but sustainable solutions are confounded by the dynamic nature of this waste stream. E-waste volume and material composition vary with technological progress and consumer trends, while policy focus on “target” materials, like lead, do not account for emerging materials of concern, like mercury, indium, and cobalt. This presentation reports the first macro analysis of U.S. e-waste flows, accounting for trends in the last 20 years. A key finding is that while new product adoption grows (~15% annually), overall e-waste mass has begun to decline, due to phase-out of cathode ray tube displays in favor of flat panel technology. However, trends towards small, mobile devices implies greater need for lithium-ion battery recycling and new business models for recyclers accustomed to deep disassembly of legacy products. The presentation will also discuss how this model is being applied to new technologies as they enter the market.
David Wagger, Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, Inc.
Presentation Title: "Is Sustainability Less Than the Sum of its Parts?"
About the Presentation
The overall sustainability of a material system is not a function only of the sustainabilities of the system’s individual components. Just because all components have high sustainability does not guarantee that the overall system does. In general, the overall sustainability will be less, but the sustainability loss can be addressed. For instance, a consumer product may be composed of a variety of materials that are individually highly recyclable, yet the product may not be economically recyclable because the method of material joining impedes recycling via current technology. New specialty materials may pose challenges if they achieve certain sustainability goals during product life (e.g., lower energy consumption) but reduce sustainability at end of life because they are inherently more difficult to recycle than the materials that they replaced. This presentation will review recent and expected trends in these and other dimensions and explore the need for new recycling technologies and advanced product design to maintain and improve material sustainability.
Chris Bayliss, International Aluminum Institute
Presentation Title: "Mineral Exploration of the Urban Mine: Dynamics of Aluminum Stocks and Flows"
About the Presentation
The stock of aluminium currently in use around the world is almost 1 billion tonnes, of a total one and a quarter billion tonnes extracted from the earth since 1888, a function of high recycling rates but more importantly long product lifetimes and increasing metal demand. However, this in-use stock is distributed unevenly around the world and in forms which don’t necessarily align with markets for the metal. This presentation will explore current and future in-use stocks of aluminium, their location, their form and their lifetimes, which will dictate availability and quality of scrap flows from different regions (and their potential for delivering circular economies). Some very recent work, carried out on behalf of the International Aluminium Institute, to quantify aluminium demand for electric and ICE vehicles in China over the coming decades, will also be addressed, with an exploration of how this might impact scrap supply (and demand).
Ramana Reddy, The University of Alabama
Presentation Title: "A New Thinking in Metals Recycling"
About the Presentation
This presentation concentrates on some of the key examples from the author’s experience and others, application of engineering fundamentals and potential applications of ionic liquids as electrolytes in aluminium and other metals production, refining and recycling with specific emphasis on energy and environmental concerns. A novel pathway for the high energy efficiency separation of metals from metal oxides, scrap, metal wastes and metal compounds by means of electrolysis in ionic liquids at low temperatures (< 120°C) are discussed. Application of ionic liquids in metals (Zn, Pb, Cu, Co, Ni, Ti, and Al) processing are presented. A 3-D mathematical model (CFD) was developed for the batch reactor for metals separation process. The optimum conditions for separation of metals and alloys are determined. The model results are in good agreement with the experimental data. The advantages of the separation of metals using ionic liquids compared to industrial aqueous metals processes are low temperature, low energy consumption, and low pollutant emissions.
Markus Reuter, Helmholtz-Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology
Presentation Title: "Challenges of the Circular Economy"
About the Presentation
A Circular Economy (CE) paradigm aims to maximize sustainability and resource efficiency by extending product life cycles and using wastes as resources. So, what is the brave step that will deliver the CE for modern services, complex products, and society in general? Questions we should, among others, ask and attempt to answer are (i) What are the challenges to achieve this move forward? (ii) What does the metallurgical infrastructure have to be that maximally recovers materials from increasingly complex products and services, while returning high quality materials back into the CE? (iii) What smart energy and water grid will maximize resource efficiency and minimize exergy destruction of an increasingly complex society and system? In order to answer these questions, the role of metallurgical processing systems, smart materials production, digital technology platforms, product design etc. will be discussed in the context of Sustainable Circular Cities. It will furthermore be shown how digitalized real-time simulation and control of material and metal flow and metallurgical processing systems i.e. the “Smart Materials Grid - SMG” will form the heart of the CE system. The SMG will integrate into the water, energy, transport, heavy industry, and other grid systems and will help drive the resource efficiency of the future “Sustainable Circular Cities.” This will help to enable “Smart Sustainable Living” by also helping to quantify and realize the United Nation’s Sustainability Development Goals.