Rare metal indium nearing exhaustion, urban mining of unused phones touted as potential solution

Indium, a rare metal used in smartphones, is on the brink of exhaustion. A potential solution lies in “urban mining”, which involves extracting resources from already mined materials. An estimated 10 million unused mobile phones in Norway contain valuable metals that can be recycled. Globally, less than 1% of rare earth metals are recycled.

If you are reading this on a smartphone, the scrolling is made possible by a thin layer of the rare metal indium. The metal is becoming increasingly scarce as humanity has almost exhausted the earth’s supply. This creates a shortage of a vital component used in smartphones, flat screens, and electric vehicles.

Meanwhile, several tons of unused metals lie around unused. The key to solving this metal shortage lies in what the recycling industry refers to as “urban mining”, which involves utilizing already extracted resources.

Old mobile phones have the greatest immediate potential for urban mining, as 95% of a mobile phone can be reused. For instance, the battery contains cobalt, graphite, and lithium; the circuit board uses gold, copper, silver, tungsten, tantalum, and tin; the processor is made of silicon supplemented with phosphorus, antimony, arsenic, boron, indium, and gallium; the screen has a thin layer of tin, potassium, and indium; and sound and vibration would not be possible without neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium.

According to GSMA, 5 billion phones worldwide are not in use. Only one in ten mobile phones is recycled, and globally, less than 1% of rare earth metals are recycled. An estimate shows that there are around 10 million mobile phones just lying around in Norway.

The value in reuse and recycling is staggering: 120 billion kroner worldwide, annually. The Red Party in Bergen recently proposed that the municipality should participate in a pilot project on urban mining.

Christian Roti of the waste management company BIR AS in Bergen believes that urban mining is a necessity. He says, “If we want a sustainable solution, and if we want these types of products in the future, we are entirely dependent on retrieving these from discarded items. We need to get it back into circulation rather than going to a traditional mine and extracting it”.