Collaborative Research: I/UCRC Phase II: Center for Resource Recovery & Recycling

Colorado School Of Mines, Golden CO

Investigators

Abstract

Materials resource recovery and recycling is a critical need for sustainable development in the 21st Century. Materials are not renewable and yet they have major impacts in every industry and product area important to the national and global economy. The industries that carry out resource recovery and recycling as well as supply equipment and technologies for it comprise a broad range of companies, a large fraction of which are small and medium enterprises. Over 56,000 such companies, engaged in some aspect of resource recovery and recycling, produce $236 billion in goods, and employ 1.21 million in primary and downstream industries. It is the purpose of the Center for Resource Recovery and Recycling (CR3) to address these opportunities through cross-sector engagement in the resource recovery and recycling value chain. Resource recovery and recycling technologies have widespread applications impacting all materials manufacturing, including, metals, plastics, paper, electronics, glass, organics, polymers & chemicals, etc. There are a number of key industry challenges in the area of resource recovery and recycling. Specifically: * Scarcity of feed stock materials and increasing cost of material resources * Increasing amounts of waste from industrial processes as well as end-of-life products * Need for solutions for resource recovery, reuse, and recycling of critical materials * Need for energetically favorable, environmentally compatible and economically viable industrial processes The increasingly rapid development of new technologies in areas such as sensors, computational modeling, simulation and visualization, big data and analytics, advanced materials, automation, and robotics offers potentially significant impacts that could greatly expand the capabilities as well as increase the efficiency of materials resource recovery and recycling and benefit the industries involved in addition to development of physical and chemical processes for sortation, beneficiation and concentration as well as value-extraction. The industries comprising the resource and recovery area tend to be disaggregated based on the type of materials recovery and recycling they carry out, and are predominantly small and medium enterprises. Therefore they not only often lack the resources to carry out the needed R&D but also those advanced manufacturing technologies that are available do not have a natural route to implementation in industry. CR3 brings together key constituencies in the resource recovery and recycling area to develop comprehensive technology transfer pathways to industry. The primary focus of CR3 is on key sectors of iron and steel, non-ferrous structural metals, light metals, rare-earths and photovoltaic metals, high-value refractory metals and electronic materials where technology development will address the product manufacturing wastes, post-consumer wastes, instrumentation, sensors and controls, design for disassembly and conversion of trash to treasure.