While this old hardware sits idle, the precious metals locked inside could be crucial for building the next generation of devices. Yet, instead of being put to new use, most of these treasures end up discarded in a landfill.
As demand for ever-more powerful chips accelerates, we continue to mine our planet for gold, silicon, and a host of other finite materials. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
To understand why these forgotten gadgets matter so much and how they can power next-gen chips in data centres, we need to look at the precarious journey of semiconductor materials around the world.
A precarious pipeline
The germanium that powers the transistors in your phone or the silicon used to make the solid-state drive in your PC comes from all over the world—but that’s half the problem.
With such a precarious supply chain, bringing all the necessary components together is a logistical nightmare, even in the best of times.
But we’re now at a period of rising tension and growing isolationism among some of the world’s leading superpowers. For many nations, it’s become every country for itself when it comes to securing vital resources.
Take China, for example. Trade tensions are at an all-time high, fuelled by the threat of absurdly high tariffs. Yet China remains one of the most resource-abundant nations when it comes to materials critical for semiconductor production.
China is, by and large, the world’s leading producer of silicon and tungsten, and also supplies hefty amounts of Rare Earth Elements (REEs) vital to chipmaking, such as cerium, lanthanum, and yttrium.
Beyond that, it is home to sizeable deposits of neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, as well as arsenic, copper, gallium, germanium, tin, and lithium.
But it’s not just about location, China also dominates the refining, processing, and manufacturing of these materials.
This geographical concentration of the world’s most essential materials is problematic enough. But it’s compounded by instability in other key supply markets.
There are sizeable deposits of cobalt, copper, and tantalum in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation grappling with insurgency; Taliban-controlled Afghanistan holds vast reserves of lithium, vital for battery production; and several REEs, along with tin, are sourced from Myanmar, ruled by a military junta.
To top it all off, we’re living in an era of ‘America First’—which, for some, increasingly means ‘America Only.’
Demand is growing rapidly, and not just from the tech sector, but also as a result of the global transition to renewable energy.
“If demand is outstripping supply, that creates a supply chain risk, and that’s one reason why things are assessed for criticality, along with things like how well we’re able to recycle them,” said Izzi Monk is the policy adviser for the environment at the Royal Society of Chemistry.
“Some metals are better or more frequently recycled than others, and that depends partly on the recycling processes available.”
The UK, Monk explained, has a list of critical minerals which are materials that are deemed of vital economic importance but where there are concerns about their current supply status. This has been expanded in recent years to reflect both evolving industrial needs and global pressures.
Key chip-making materials like gallium, graphite, and silicon are on the list, of which the country, along with its continental neighbours, the EU, are almost wholly dependent on imports of.
“The first critical minerals assessment was in 2021, and it’s just been redone in 2024. The number of minerals on that list has grown by 17,” Monk said. “It shows the breadth of materials that are now really important, with new additions like aluminium being interesting because of its use in wind turbines which need to grow significantly in capacity to meet UK government targets for wind energy.”
This broadening risk is further complicated by rising global tensions. Monk acknowledged that the current climate parallels historic shocks: “We’ve seen in the past, with things like oil and gas, that the security of supply is incredibly important.
“These materials are now just as vital to countries’ economies, and any disruption can have far-reaching consequences.”
The sheer range of sectors competing for these same finite resources, from electric vehicles to renewables, means competition is only set to intensify.
“Copper is a good example,” Monk added. “It’s used in basically anything that’s electrified. Demand is growing so fast, there’s a risk of outweighing the supply, especially as more sectors electrify.”
Mountains of missed opportunity
If the scramble for chip resources is intensifying, the scale of the materials already present in the drawers of the world is even more staggering.
According to Mark Hall, waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) waste expert at BusinessWaste.co.uk, there are almost 350 million tonnes of unrecycled e-waste on Earth.
“We know there’s a huge amount of potential that isn’t being unlocked when it comes to extracting materials from WEEE waste.”
Two pieces of research that Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) teams have conducted in recent years show the scale and complexity of the problem. An Ipsos MORI survey the RSC organised showed 51% of UK households had at least one unused electronic device, with some households clinging on to up to 10.
A separate study found that around 347,000 tonnes of copper will be needed to build wind turbines and solar panels by 2030. Recycle Your Electricals has identified that 30% of this copper could be produced from recycled copper that is currently thrown away
The problem isn’t limited to what’s in our homes. Landmark tech transitions, like the recent 3G switch-off, have exposed just how much value is tied up in discarded devices.
“The figures from the 3G switch-off are staggering—over £10 million in gold alone,” Hall suggested. “The value of e-waste generated by the 3G switch off is so high because it will mean a high number of smartphones become obsolete. We know that mobile phones contain high amounts of valuable metals such as gold, copper, silver, and palladium.”
But it’s not just phones. Cheaper electrical items, like earphones, and even the rise of disposable vapes, contain traces of vital materials that could be used to make next-generation chips, yet are simply left to rot.
“Regardless, there’s a staggering amount of electronic waste heading to landfills. We know there’s an enormous missed potential in extracting metals from this,” he says.
Enterprise infrastructure—think servers and networking kit—may prove especially valuable.
“The sheer scale of enterprise infrastructure like servers means that it’s likely to contain far higher quantities of precious metals. Alongside this, it’s often in a much better condition and doesn’t see the same wear and tear as consumer electronics. This may mean the value to extract the materials will be much higher.”
However, with consumer tech, the volumes are still enormous, even as habits begin to change.
“We see much more of a throwaway culture, with planned obsolescence built in. That means there’s usually a higher volume of technology to utilise from this market,” Hall notes.
Yet there are signs that this disposable mindset is starting to soften somewhat. Major mobile brands have long profited from frequent upgrades, but recent data from Assurant shows that consumers are now holding onto their phones for longer, with the average replacement cycle rising from just under three years to over three and a half.
Even so, with new devices released each year and old ones tucked away in drawers, vast quantities of critical materials remain out of circulation—idle when they could be put back to work.
Some have floated the idea of mining landfills for lost e-waste, but as things stand, the real opportunity—and the ethical imperative—lies in keeping precious materials in circulation before they’re ever buried.
Hall didn’t see this as an economically viable option, with it being difficult to retrieve items and extremely unsafe.
“Many layers of waste are buried in landfills and each day the waste is covered and compacted. With such a mix of materials in landfills, there’s the constant risk of materials shifting, which could lead to landslides and collapses. Alongside this, methane gas that has accumulated from decomposing waste can lead to fires or explosions when disturbed.
“Safety aside, there’s also the issue that many of the materials may not be worth recovering. Any materials buried under mounds of waste for a number of years will have been exposed to the elements. Leachate, the toxic landfill liquids created by waste, and the heat generated from gases like methane could also contribute to rust, corrosion, or even the melting of metals.”
“It’s important that the whole supply chain looks to invest in materials recovery and place a higher focus on the practice,” Hall said. “Government-led initiatives could also help to encourage the potential of e-waste recovery as a market.”
Closing the loop on data centre waste
Few people have watched the data centre industry’s material churn more closely than Simon Taylor. After founding Next Generation Data, the massive Welsh data centre since acquired by Vantage, Taylor saw, up close, the problem of high-value hardware going out almost as quickly as it came in.
“When we built our data centre, we had huge lorries turning up—Microsoft, IBM, BT—taking away kit that had only been in play for two or three years, and replacing it immediately with brand new blades and servers. Hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth, just moving in and out,” Taylor recalls. “We started asking ourselves, where does all this stuff go?”
The answer, he discovered, was mostly overseas. “Very, very little of that stuff gets recycled in a positive way. It ends up being put in huge container ships and taken to Europe or the Far East—Japan, China, India. There, it’s either incinerated en masse or processed with very toxic acid combinations. It’s chronically bad for the environment and air pollution, and it’s done on an industrial scale.”
Taylor’s combined curiosity and frustration led him into a partnership with long-time business collaborator Nick Razey and a British recycling family with deep experience in handling telecoms kit. The result is Bioscope Technologies, which is pioneering large-scale, sustainable bioleaching for the UK and beyond.
Bioscope’s process replaces the brute force of traditional smelting and chemical leaching with biotechnology, using bacteria to extract precious metals from crushed circuit boards.
“We’re using a biochemical process to lift our metals off our boards,” Taylor explained. “We’re getting there, we’ve got gold production underway, we’re working on palladium and platinum, and we can get large quantities of copper off boards.”
The process begins with sorting and analysing incoming hardware, breaking down circuit boards into small pellets, then using naturally occurring bacteria in specialised tanks to separate out metals like gold, copper, silver, and palladium.
Unlike traditional recycling, which can release greenhouse gases and hazardous chemicals, bioleaching is as close to zero-emission as possible, using a fraction of the energy and producing minimal waste.
To scale this from a lab experiment to an industrial operation, the Bioscope team has snapped up a growing team of chemists and biochemists from leading universities.
The firm operates out of a purpose-built facility in Cambridge, with multiple UK sites in development. The company has filed patents on its bioleaching and biorefining processes, and is now capable of processing 5 metric tonnes of printed circuit boards (PCBs) per day
Taylor believes the industry, especially in Britain, is finally waking up to the need for domestic solutions.
“There’s a massive agenda starting to circulate. The repatriation of precious metals and resources is critically important to this economy, because what happens now is those resources end up in factories in Japan or China. By the time that agenda becomes important, which it’s starting to now, we should be able to process stuff on an industrial scale.”
He also points to a growing commercial interest from large tech players—data centre giants and cloud providers who want dedicated, sustainable recycling plants for their hardware, noting: “They all want to discuss the merits of building plants specifically for their own use.”
For Taylor, bioleaching offers a route to “close the loop” in the data centre and telco sector, keeping critical resources in circulation and making Britain less dependent on volatile global supply chains.
“If we can do it in big enough numbers, it’s economically viable—cheaper than turning on furnaces, and all you have to do is keep a range of bacteria happy,” he says. “It’s a green and efficient way to recover what would otherwise go to waste.”
With the world generating e-waste five times faster than it can be recycled, Taylor and Bioscope are betting big: investing millions, partnering with large operators, and pushing for a change in how we think about end-of-life hardware.
As governments and businesses wake up to the scale of the challenge, their approach could soon become a model for circularity in digital infrastructure, both in the UK and around the world.
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