So Long, Periodic Table?

Your discarded paper, plastics, and compostable materials are ready at the curb, and your depleted batteries and compact fluorescent bulbs are tucked away, waiting for a special recycling drop-off day. All is well in the world of recycling, right? Not if you look at metals recycling. Scientific American’s David Biello takes a look at a study recently published in Science which concluded that “metals are infinitely recyclable in principle, but in practice, recycling is often inefficient or essentially nonexistent.”

“Altogether, we are talking about 60 metals that we have in the periodic table,” says study co-author Barbara Reck. “We are right now recycling maybe 20 of them, and 30 to 40 of these specialty metals are not at all recycled.” (Biello’s more provocative take: “Humans are ready to trash the periodic table.”)

While almost all the world’s lead is strictly regulated and recycled, Biello notes, aluminum, copper, nickel, steel, and zinc barely top fifty percent in recycling rates. Yet “mining and recycling can require as much as 20 times the amount of energy as recycling a given material.” Beck's study also notes that nearly 16,000 metric tons of the rare-earth metal neodymium were used in 2007, mainly for magnets in products such as hybrid cars to wind turbines. “Little to none of that material is currently being recycled,” conclude the authors.

Image by iStock/ermingut

Reed McManus is a senior editor at Sierra.  He has worked on the magazine since Ronald Reagan’s second term.  For inspiration, he turns to cartoonist R. Crumb’s  Mr. Natural, who famously noted: “Twas ever thus.”