In addition to the high consumption of energy and water, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) It has an environmental impact that is not talked about so much: it generates a lot of Electronic waste, and recycle them and recover their critical metals is expensive and is not sufficiently widespread.
The exponential development of this technology has increased the demand for graphic processing chips, necessary to train the generative AI models, capable of producing new and original content from previously learned data.
“The life cycle of these chips is three to five years, it means that after that time, and even a little before, they are discarded,” Ana Valdivia, a teacher, government and policies of the Oxford University Internet Institute, in the United Kingdomwhich states that this concrete impact of AI is “very invisible.”
The cost of recycling these chips is high, – it is not economically viable for companies, says Valdivia – so much of them end up incinerated, with their consequent polluting emissions, or in landfills.
According to the most recent report of the United Nations University (UNU)in 2022 62 million tons of electronic waste were generated in the world, a record figure of which only 22% were collected and recycled.
The production of electronic waste increases five times further than its recycling, the report warned, which indicated that, if no measures are taken, the amount of this waste could increase more than 33% from here to 2030.
Critical metals
The recycling of electronic waste would not only reduce its environmental impact, it would also allow to take advantage of materials at a time when critical metals have become a geostrategic issue.
“We are facing a very important raw material in terms of metal source that can be recovered,” says Efe Félix Antonio López, researcher at the National Metallurgical Research Center of the CSIC, in Spain, which points out that materials such as copper, tin, silver, gold, paladium or even nickel can be used.
The European Union It is promoting the study of the mining deposits of the continent in search of rare earths and other critical materials, but López defends that this bet must be accompanied by “clear policies that favor and even impose” the recycling of these materials at the end of their life cycle.
“Otherwise, we will hardly minimize that dependence that we have at this time in other countries,” warns the CSIC researcher, where they have just installed a “unique in Europe” pilot to recover electronic waste metals and manufacture high-value alloys, within the framework of the RC-Metals project.
This plant is an “embryo” of the circular project that the Atlantic Copper company is developing in Huelva to recover metals from electronic waste, declared strategic by the European Commission.
RC-Metals will allow developing new lines of research “because modern electronic scrap metals that were not in the oldest”, such as the famous rare earth, explains the CSIC researcher.
One of the companies that is dedicated to the recycling of electronic waste is Movilex, which operates in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.
The devices reach Movilex plants from clean points, companies or other origins, are classified, decontaminated – to extract dangerous components – and then the valuation process begins, to extract their metals but also other materials such as plastic.
“In many devices we reached 99% recyclability. There is a sector where we really are very pointer and very competitive,” It points to Efe the CEO of Movilex, Luis García-Torremocha, whose company also has a business line dedicated to refine the recovered metals.
The entrepreneur considers that “there is still much to develop at the normative level and, above all, to get to quite high recycling rates” in the electronics industry, which in addition to the environmental benefit, would generate wealth and jobs.
Extend life and stop the boom
But beyond betting on circularity, Professor Valdivia also insists that the useful life of the chips is lengthened and that companies that design them, as Nvidia, invest in it.
And also calls to “stop” the boom of the construction of data centers and to introduce AI in any aspect of life.
“We have to pay, sit and think as a society what kind of technology we want and what kind of infrastructure benefits us at the community level,” The Oxford researcher concludes, who defends to address AI from a “critical perspective” and study its environmental impact.