Under the umbrella of the EU Prospecting Secondary Raw Materials in the Urban Mine and Mining Wastes Twenty tons of gold are lost from Europe’s vehicle fleet each year. Source: Empa(ProSUM) initiative, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, are inventorying the metal resources embodied in end-of-life vehicles.

The information is being used to develop the first European database of valuable materials available for "urban mining" from scrap vehicles, spent batteries, waste electronic and electrical equipment, and mining wastes. Europe's end-of-life vehicles represent a large source of secondary base metals like steel (213 million tons), aluminum (24 million tons) and copper (7.3 million tons), as well as platinum and palladium used in car catalysts. Increasingly, vehicles also contain large amounts of critical raw materials due to electronics, as well as alloying elements used in steel, aluminum and magnesium.

The researchers estimate that by 2020 there will be nearly 18,000 tons of neodymium, a rare earth metal, in the active vehicle fleet – nine times the amount present in the year 2000. In 2015 there were an estimated 400 or so tons of gold in Europe’s vehicle fleet, while the vehicles that left the fleet contained in the region of 20 tons of gold – which, in addition, was not recycled. The quantity of gold in end-of-life vehicles is now comparable to that in electrical and electronic scrap. These recoverable resources are spread out in small quantities; in a new car, for example, there may be a gram or two of gold distributed over several tens of components.

The final ProSUM report concludes that:

•In the EU, Norway and Switzerland about 10 million tons of electrical and electronic equipment and 2 million tons of batteries are disposed of as waste each year, while 14 million tons of vehicles leave the fleet.

•On average every individual in the EU owns 250 kilograms of electrical and electronic equipment, 17 kilograms of batteries and nearly 600 kilograms of vehicles.

•One single smartphone contains about 40 critical and scarce metals, with a concentration of gold that is 25–30 times higher than in the richest gold ores.