By Emmanuel Delplanque, Co-Founder & CEO of BE-CAUSE. A tonne of old phones holds more gold than a tonne of gold ore. Let that sit for a moment. Every smartphone carries traces of gold, silver, copper, palladium and rare earths, concentrated enough that recovering them yields more precious metal per tonne of input than an actual mine. We call it urban mining. The mine already exists. It is sitting in a drawer somewhere.
Estimates put the number of unused mobile phones in the world at around five billion. We are digging new holes in the earth to extract materials that are already above ground, already refined, already embedded in products we have discarded. The linear model — extract, manufacture, consume, discard — is not just environmentally costly. It is economically irrational.
The mine is already above ground
The comparison is not rhetorical, it is a matter of grade. Primary gold ore is typically mined at one to five grams of gold per tonne of rock. Printed circuit boards from mobile handsets run several hundred grams of gold per tonne of boards, plus silver, copper, palladium, cobalt in the battery, and neodymium in the speakers and vibration motors. On grade alone, the drawer beats the pit.
And yet the world generated roughly 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, of which only about 22% was formally collected and recycled, according to the UN's Global E-waste Monitor. The rest leaks into informal channels, landfill, or storage. The volume of e-waste is growing about five times faster than documented recycling capacity. That is not a technology gap. It is a collection, design and information gap.
Why the linear model has become a procurement risk, not an ethics debate
For a long time, circularity was filed under corporate responsibility. Three forces moved it into the risk register.
- Concentration. For several critical minerals — rare earths, gallium, germanium, natural graphite, refined cobalt — a single country controls the majority of global processing capacity. Export controls, not geology, now set the availability of your bill of materials.
- Price volatility. Lithium, cobalt and nickel have moved by factors, not percentages, within single years. A product designed around virgin material with no recovered alternative carries an unhedged cost exposure.
- Regulation. The EU Critical Raw Materials Act sets 2030 benchmarks for domestic extraction, processing and recycling, and caps reliance on any single third country. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and the Digital Product Passport turn durability, repairability and recycled content into disclosable product attributes, not marketing claims.
Put together: the materials you cannot trace are the materials you cannot secure, price, or defend in an audit.
Circular economy is a data problem before it is a materials problem
This is what the circular economy actually means in practice. Not a CSR chapter. Not a recycling bin in the canteen. A fundamentally different relationship between materials and value — where ecodesign ensures products can be disassembled, where supply chains are mapped deeply enough to know what materials flow through them, and where the end of one product's life becomes the beginning of another's.
But none of this works without one thing: knowing what is actually inside your supply chain. Four questions decide whether your circularity strategy is real or decorative.
- Which of your suppliers genuinely use recycled content, with a certificate that traces back to a recycler and a batch?
- Which ones claim recycled content but cannot show a chain of custody — the most common failure we see in Tier 2 and Tier 3 in Asia?
- Which materials in your products are recoverable at end of life, and which are permanently lost because they are glued, alloyed or co-moulded into a mixture nobody can separate economically?
- Which materials disappear from your records entirely at Tier 2, where the substitution actually happens?
The loop only closes when the data is real.
Ecodesign: the loop is closed at the drawing board, not at the bin
Roughly 80% of a product's environmental impact — and almost all of its recyclability — is determined at design stage. A phone glued shut is not a recycling problem, it is a design decision made years earlier. Under ESPR, that decision becomes traceable: the Digital Product Passport will carry material composition, substances of concern, recycled content and disassembly information for regulated product categories, starting with batteries and extending progressively across textiles, electronics, steel and more.
For a supplier, this means the material declaration is no longer an annex to the quotation. It is part of the product.
What a credible recycled content claim actually requires
| Material | Where the value hides | Typical recovery reality | What to demand from the supplier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold, silver, palladium | Printed circuit boards, connectors, plating | High recovery when boards are collected; near zero when the device is stored or landfilled | Refiner name, batch-level mass balance certificate |
| Copper | Wiring, motors, busbars | Mature and economically attractive recycling loop | Share of secondary copper in the alloy, with mill certificate |
| Cobalt, lithium, nickel | Batteries | Improving fast under battery regulation; quality depends on collection | Cell supplier, recycled content per EU Battery Regulation methodology |
| Rare earths (Nd, Dy) | Magnets in speakers, motors, actuators | Very low recovery in practice — magnets are rarely separated | Magnet origin and whether the assembly allows magnet extraction |
| Plastics and composites | Housings, packaging, textiles blends | Recyclable in principle, downcycled in practice when blended | Polymer identity, single-polymer design, recycled resin certificate |
The pattern is consistent: value is recovered where the material can be identified and separated, and lost where it cannot. Traceability is not paperwork around the physics — it is what makes the physics possible.
What this means if you are a buyer
Recycled content is one of the very few Scope 3 Category 1 levers that reduces emissions and cost exposure at the same time — secondary aluminium, copper and steel typically carry a fraction of the carbon of their primary equivalents. But a claim you cannot verify is a liability under CSRD and under green-claims scrutiny. Ask for evidence at batch level, not at company level, and place the requirement in the specification, not in the supplier code of conduct.
What this means if you are a supplier
Material traceability is becoming a commercial qualification. Suppliers in China, Vietnam and India who can document polymer identity, secondary metal share and disassembly logic will win the specifications that competitors lose on paperwork alone. The cost of building that file once is far lower than the cost of answering forty different customer questionnaires with numbers you cannot defend.
Four steps to make circularity operational
- Map the materials, not just the spend: identify the ten components that concentrate your critical and precious materials.
- Go to Tier 2. Substitution and recycled content claims live where your direct supplier buys, not where you buy.
- Convert claims into evidence: certificates, batch traceability, mass balance — collected once, reused across customers and regulations.
- Feed the result back into design: if a material cannot be recovered, the fix is upstream in the drawing, not downstream in the waste contract.
“The mine already exists. It is sitting in a drawer somewhere — and in a bill of materials nobody has fully mapped.”
Visual inspiration for this piece: Dillon Marsh's "For What It's Worth" series, which renders the total output of a mine as a single sphere beside the pit it came from — art that makes the invisible weight of extraction visible.