I believe the argument is about the refining process and the chemical waste it creates, which is substantially higher when trying to extract 99.99% pure copper, zinc, gold, silver and other industrial elements which are converted into electronics. I'm a hobbyist fan of silver and know just the basics - refining for 99.99% pure silver looks like making crack to my eyes. :) Breaking Bad level chemicals.
I'm to understand the act of creating and "washing" circuit boards also uses a large amount of caustic chemicals, as does the attempted recycling/recovery (to basically eat away the coatings to expose the reclaimable metals). Refining for purity has a high environmental cost to get it from ore -> 99.99% and to reuse/recycle it, I speculate much higher than iron ore (train tracks, etc.) require/use.
Interesting claim, but to justify a few milligrams of metals is worse than literally tons of metal and cement is going to require a quantitative argument.
99.99%, even if you’re right, only gets us to 10kg equivalent if you start with 1 gram.
(And keep in mind that these processes to make bulk materials themselves use alloying agents and specialty materials in cutting heads, etc, to fabricate them.)
It requires tonnes of ore processed to produce ounces of gold (I read roughly 13 tonnes on average, but it's highly dependent on the quality of the deposit and refinement difficulty), there are metrics and studies: https://www.businessinsider.com/tons-of-rock-for-an-ounce-of...
Keep in mind your conventional car’s catalytic converter contains grams of platinum group metals, worth about $1000 or so now ($3000 for older, larger catalytic converters). Due in large part to the spike in rhodium prices.
Platinum is extracted as a by-product of nickel and copper mining (as are other elements) as it's primary source, unlike gold and copper which are mined for their element directly. Not arguing your point (45% of platinum is used in auto) only that how we get Pt and Pd is already in progress to get at the other elements like Cu, Au and Ag.
But IS it a mere byproduct? If it adds significant revenue, it’s no longer a mere byproduct but now part of the business proposition of the mine. About $30 billion of nickel is mined per year. About $8 billion in platinum mined per year. 30 tons of rhodium are mined per year, which at current >$900/gram prices, means the revenue from rhodium is actually HIGHER than platinum and on par with nickel.
So you could as well argue that nickel is a byproduct of rhodium (and platinum group metal) production.
The USA mints alone use roughly 4,400 tonnes of nickel to produce coins every year (one specific industry with one type of output in one country). Around 133 tonnes of platinum and 1,800 tonnes of gold are mined per year in total for all use globally.
I believe the argument is about the refining process and the chemical waste it creates, which is substantially higher when trying to extract 99.99% pure copper, zinc, gold, silver and other industrial elements which are converted into electronics. I'm a hobbyist fan of silver and know just the basics - refining for 99.99% pure silver looks like making crack to my eyes. :) Breaking Bad level chemicals.
I'm to understand the act of creating and "washing" circuit boards also uses a large amount of caustic chemicals, as does the attempted recycling/recovery (to basically eat away the coatings to expose the reclaimable metals). Refining for purity has a high environmental cost to get it from ore -> 99.99% and to reuse/recycle it, I speculate much higher than iron ore (train tracks, etc.) require/use.