Andre clocks into his job at the Kamoto Copper Company (KCC) in the Democratic Republic of Congo at 7 in the morning, and he leaves at 6 at night. The work is physically demanding, and while KCC provides Andre with lunch, he says the food quality is poor, and he’s often hungry afterward. He is also thirsty, with only a little over a liter of water provided to him a day, despite toiling deep underground in a mine that gets swelteringly hot.

“We asked KCC for more water, but they haven’t done anything,” Andre, whose real name is being withheld to protect his identity, said in an interview with human rights watchdog group Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID), a transcript of which was shared with The Verge. “I am often thirsty, but I have to endure.”

KCC is the largest cobalt-producing mine in the world. Located in the heart of the DRC’s Katangan Copperbelt, each year, the mine churns out over 20,000 tons of the silvery metal used in cell phone, laptop, and electric car batteries. Largely owned and operated by multinational mining company Glencore, KCC prides itself on supporting the local economy and upholding high labor standards. In 2020, Reuters reported that Tesla inked a deal with Glencore to purchase a quarter of the mine’s cobalt for its EV batteries, a move seen as an attempt to insulate it from allegations of human rights abuses in its supply chain. 

The DRC produces roughly 70 percent of the world’s cobalt supply. For years, human rights watchdogs have been raising the alarm about dangerous working conditions and the use of child labor in the artisanal mining sector, where informal workers (workers not employed by a company) mine cobalt by hand using their own resources.

Historically, large, industrial, company-run cobalt mines like KCC have received less scrutiny. But working conditions there are far from ideal, according to interviews with nearly a dozen current KCC employees and contractors conducted by RAID and The Verge. The employees, all of whom requested anonymity due to concerns over company retaliation, described working long hours with limited food and water for pay that often does not cover living expenses. That’s especially true for workers employed through subcontractors, who make up 44 percent of KCC’s 11,000-strong workforce. 

Jean, a KCC security guard employed by a subcontractor, earns just $135 a month working 50 hours a week. Another contracted security guard, Marc, makes $300 a month working 66 hours a week. For an average household of two adults and four children, a living wage in the region is $402 per month, according to RAID.

“The food is not sufficient. This salary is nothing. There is no promotion at our company,” Marc tells The Verge. 

These employees’ accounts are a warning sign that the EV boom is being fueled by exploited labor deep in the supply chain. Mines like KCC are at the center of a geopolitical arms race in which powerful countries and companies are scrambling to acquire the resources needed to dominate the transition to EVs and clean energy — while making investors very rich in the process. But the Congolese workers toiling long hours to wrench this critical mineral from the Earth aren’t getting much in return.

​​“It is very difficult; I can only fulfill around 25 percent of my needs,” Jean said in an interview with RAID. “If there were other jobs available, I wouldn’t be there.”

In response to detailed questions from RAID about the KCC mine, Glencore emphasized its commitment to worker health and safety, respecting human rights, and “good working conditions and fair salaries,” including for KCC’s suppliers and subcontractors. All direct KCC employees are paid above the DRC’s minimum wage of $3.50 USD per day, the company said, and contractors are also expected to provide “fair remuneration” that is “in line with DRC legislation.” Glencore also said that all KCC employees are supplied with personal protective equipment needed for their jobs and that employees and contractors working underground receive “a minimum” of 1.5 liters of water a day, with an additional 1.2 liters provided to those working 12-hour shifts.

But workers who spoke with The Verge and RAID were more critical of the salaries and working conditions at KCC. In general, workers agreed that the mining company does a good job ensuring workers’ physical safety, although some noted that severe injuries and deaths occur from time to time. (Since 2018, there have been five fatalities at the mine, including two last year, according to Glencore.) 

Food and water are a different story: Many workers RAID spoke with, particularly those working underground in the mine, complained of being chronically thirsty on the job due to the labor-intensive nature of the work, high temperatures, and lack of access to taps or fountains inside the mine. A Glencore spokesperson told The Verge that workers can have “as much water as they need” from potable water stations in communal areas.

Monique, who works for a cleaning company contracted by KCC, said that she and her co-workers are not provided with any water and have to ask other KCC employees for it. 

“I am often thirsty at work,” Monique, who works about 50 hours a week and earns $350 per month, said in an interview with RAID. 

Other employees described going hungry at work. Francois, a KCC employee who works five 12-hour shifts a week, says that he does not have a lunch break and often leaves work without having eaten all day. “I would like to have breaks,” Francois said, but “we are under pressure to produce.” Andre, who also works 12-hour shifts, said that the food quality is “not good” and that there have been no improvements despite complaints from workers. 

“The food that is given is not at all comfortable,” said Christian, another KCC employee who works as an electrician. “Many claims have been made but in vain.” Glencore told The Verge that the company provides “a comprehensive, balanced meal” to each mine worker each day.

Many KCC workers interviewed by The Verge and RAID, including some of those employed directly by KCC whose salaries tended to be above $800 a month, said that their earnings were not enough to meet their daily needs. Several also lamented the difficulty obtaining a promotion at the company, alleging that foreigners are hired to fill top positions for salaries far in excess of what the Congolese make. 

“They fetch people from elsewhere [for management], which results in no promotion for Congolese,” said Francois. “You can work 10 years and have the same job.”

The difficulty obtaining a promotion is “the negative point of the company,” said Christian, who has worked at KCC for seven years without receiving one. 

Glencore told RAID that it is making efforts to boost the number of management positions held by Congolese nationals and that the figure stood at 85 percent as of July 2021. It also said it has promoted more than 3,000 employees in the last five years, most of them Congolese nationals, and that Congolese and non-Congolese employees are “treated equally in terms of benefits and bonuses.” All salaries for foreign and Congolese workers have been “benchmarked and are market competitive,” a spokesperson told The Verge.

The issues raised by workers at KCC are alarming to Anneke Van Woudenberg, the executive director at RAID. But mining companies are often reluctant to make voluntary improvements to their labor practices that could eat into their bottom line, like paying all workers a living wage. Benjamin Sovacool, a professor of energy policy at the University of Sussex who has conducted research on cobalt mining in the DRC, says that companies often match their standards to the requirements of the country they’re operating in: “And Congo has some of the worst best practices there is.”

Compounding the problem, Van Woudenberg says that companies will often tout their adherence to industry human rights standards that target a limited number of issues. For instance, in its most recent impact report, Tesla stated that it only works with cobalt suppliers in the DRC that conform with the Responsible Minerals Initiative Responsible Minerals Assurance Process (RMAP), whose standards focus on forced labor and the worst forms of child labor. While RMAP’s standards are important, they target two “very narrow issues around labor rights,” Van Woudenberg says.

“In effect, the bar is set so low on respect for workers’ rights that it is largely meaningless,” she adds. Tesla disbanded its public relations department in 2019 and no longer responds to questions from reporters.

Sovacool says there’s “obviously more” Glencore can do to improve conditions for workers at the KCC mine. At the same time, he felt that the company is more attuned to labor rights issues than some of its competitors. This impression seems to align with the findings of a recent RAID report, which interviewed workers at KCC as well as four other large industrial mines, including three — Sino-Congolaise des Mines, or Sicomines; Société Minière de Deziwa, or Somidez; and Tenke Fungurume Mining, or TFM —that are majority-owned by various Chinese firms and one, Metalkol, owned by a Luxembourg-based company. 

The three Chinese mines provide a steady supply of cobalt to the world’s largest EV market. Desk research by RAID indicates that some cobalt from TFM is also supplied to Umicore’s Kokkola Refinery in Finland and, from there, to Europe’s EV battery supply chain. In December, Umicore and Volkswagen announced a new joint venture to develop EV batteries.

At all of these mines, RAID found a pattern of long working hours, low compensation, and heavy use of subcontracted laborers who tend to earn far less than direct employees. But workers at these other mines also complained of violent abuse, discrimination, and extremely unsafe working conditions. Mine workers described being asked to perform dangerous jobs without proper safety equipment, being told to return to work shortly after experiencing serious injuries, and witnessing preventable deaths. Workers interviewed by RAID also alleged witnessing employees being beaten, kicked, flogged with sticks, and verbally abused by their Chinese supervisors. None of the companies behind these mines responded to requests for comment from The Verge.

“They treated us like animals, not like humans,” said a former employee who worked at TFM as a security guard in 2020, in an interview shared with The Verge.

Investigations like RAID’s put consumer-facing EV companies in a difficult position. A major selling point of EVs is that these cars are better for the planet. But consumers who might be attracted to an EV because of its green credentials could feel differently if they learn that the battery inside it was made with exploited labor. 

The reputational risk is severe enough that some companies, like Tesla and General Motors, are exploring new battery chemistries that use less cobalt or replace it with other metals entirely. (Last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that the company’s cobalt usage would be “going to zero soon,” although when exactly that will be remains unclear.)

But eliminating cobalt doesn’t change the fact that until the world significantly ramps up EV battery recycling, most battery metals will need to be mined from the Earth. And there are no guarantees that the metals inside a nickel or aluminum-rich battery will be mined under better conditions than cobalt is. At the same time, if powerful players choose to divest entirely from countries like the DRC to avoid reputational damage, that could do more harm to local workers and economies than exploitative mines.

And it may be years before new, cobalt-free batteries that can deliver the same performance as cobalt-rich ones are widely adopted by the industry. While they are in development, the EV boom will continue to accelerate, causing global cobalt demand to rise by up to 20-fold over the next two decades. 

As demand surges, advocates like Van Woudenberg are concerned that the plight of Congolese miners will worsen unless the industry is forced to reckon with its labor practices. Mining companies and consumer-facing EV brands both have a responsibility, she says, to apply “much stronger ESG credentials,” including ensuring that all workers in their supply chains are paid a living wage and that none are subject to workplace abuse. 

But given the voluntary nature of industry labor standards, Van Woudenberg believes governments will ultimately have to step in and craft new laws and regulations to ensure minerals mined to support the clean energy transition are mined responsibly. 

If that doesn’t happen, some of the people least responsible for the climate crisis could wind up paying a steep price to solve it.

Correction: An earlier version of the story suggested that one of KCC’s underground mine workers works in an open pit mine. The open pit and underground mines are different parts of KCC’s mining operation. The text has been corrected, and The Verge regrets the error.

On a former train track bed connecting the towns of Midleton and Youghal in County Cork, Ireland, workers recently excavated the rusted remains of an old railway bridge and installed a pedestrian one in its place. The bridge would have been an unremarkable milestone in the development of a new pedestrian greenway through the Irish countryside, if not for what it’s made of: recycled wind turbine blades.

That makes it just the second “blade bridge” in the world. The first, installed last October in a small town in western Poland, officially opened in early January. The engineers and entrepreneurs behind these bridges are hopeful they represent the beginning of a new trend: repurposing old wind turbine blades for infrastructure projects. 

It keeps them out of landfills and saves energy required to make new construction materials. When civil engineer Kieran Ruane first saw concept designs for a bridge built with wind turbine blades, he said the idea was “immediately appealing.”

“It was a no-brainer that this needed to be investigated and trialed, at least,” Ruane, a lecturer at Ireland’s Munster Technological University and a member of Re-Wind, the research network behind Ireland’s new blade bridge, tells The Verge.

Creative solutions will be necessary to deal with the wind turbine blade waste that’s coming. Averaging over 150 feet in length and weighing upwards of a dozen tons each, wind turbine blades take up huge amounts of space in landfills. Once there, the ultra-sturdy, fiber-reinforced plastics they’re made of don’t break down easily. Decommissioned wind turbine blades, if they’re not just stockpiled, are often destined for landfills today. The main alternative, incinerating them for energy, creates additional pollution.

That could change if ideas like blade bridges take off. Marcin Sobczyk, a product developer at Anmet, the company behind Poland’s new blade bridge, tells The Verge that wind blades often have decades of life left in them after a turbine is decommissioned. And the same material properties that make blades good at harnessing wind power — strength, lightweightness, and all-weather durability — also make them attractive as engineering support structures.

“These constructions should be able to exist for at least a hundred years,” Sobczyk says of blade bridges, adding that most wind turbines are only designed to be in use for two to three decades. “So we really increase this period of use.” Ruane also told The Verge that blade bridges, like other types of bridges, can be designed to last for more than a century.

Originally a metals recycling company, Anmet started exploring ways to repurpose wind blades about seven years ago. Since then, it developed a small commercial business making outdoor furniture out of discarded wind turbine blades. Bridges, Sobczyk says, are the next area it would like to expand into commercially.

The company’s first blade bridge took about three years to test, permit, and build. After harvesting decommissioned blades from a wind farm in Germany, the blades were subjected to a battery of engineering tests in partnership with Poland’s Rzeszów University of Technology before being cut up to create the primary support structures for a pedestrian footbridge. In October, Amnet installed that bridge over a river in Szprotawa, the small town where the company is headquartered. 

Because it was a first-of-its-kind demonstration, Anmet financed the bridge, along with a grant from the European Union to help cover the cost of the engineering tests. In the future, the company hopes to get paid by municipalities to build similar bridges across Poland, Germany, and beyond. Sobczyk believes Amnet will be able to offer a price that’s competitive with traditional steel and concrete bridges while also solving a waste problem by taking decommissioned blades off wind energy companies’ hands.

The team behind the new Irish blade bridge also believes they will be cost-competitive with more traditional bridges in addition to offering environmental advantages. Angela Nagle, a civil engineering Ph.D. candidate at the University College Cork and a member of the ReWind network, says that by using blades decommissioned from a wind farm in Belfast, the team avoided nearly 800 kilograms of CO2 emissions that would have occurred had they used steel girders. ReWind, she says, is exploring other ways to streamline production of future bridges, including through standardized design elements and by developing more efficient ways to evaluate the condition of used blades and “bucket them for various repurposing applications.”

Such efforts may be key to launching companies that can build bridges efficiently enough to turn a profit. According to Ruane, a major challenge in constructing these bridges is reverse-engineering the physical properties of the blades, which manufacturers typically consider proprietary information. For ReWind’s first bridge, the team conducted nine months of engineering and materials tests to inform the bridge’s design. Whether future testing can be streamlined to save time and scale up production is “perhaps the key question in some respects,” Ruane says.

But Ruane is hopeful that as blade manufacturers and wind energy companies start to see structures like this out in the world, the repurposing market will “get more buy-in from the industry.” Ruane says he’s had preliminary conversations with a number of blade manufacturers that are “starting to get interested in what we’re doing.” 

As blade bridge builders seek additional support from industries and governments alike, their first public constructions face a more imminent test: public opinion. While ReWind’s blade bridge won’t open until the spring when County Cork’s new greenway section is completed, Anmet’s bridge is already in use. Sobczyk estimates that “80 to 90 percent” of the comments he’s received on the bridge have been positive, although some locals have found its appearance a bit strange. Anmet also faced some skepticism when it first began placing repurposed wind blade furniture around town.

“Some people said they don’t like it,” Sobczyk says. 

But in summer, as residents began spending more time outside, Sobczyk says that negative opinions about the furniture started to shift. People started to realize “that they have something new. Something like these never existed.”

In 2016, Apple announced that it had developed a recycling robot, called Liam, that could deconstruct an iPhone in 11 seconds. Six years and several machine generations later, Apple still won’t disclose how many iPhones its robots have recycled for parts.

But the potential impact of artificially intelligent robots on e-waste recycling more broadly might soon become clear, thanks to a new research project that seeks to develop AI-powered tools that allow a robotic recycler to harvest parts from many different models of phones. If such technology can be commercialized, researchers are hopeful it could vastly improve the recycling of smartphones and other small, portable electronics.

While today’s e-waste recyclers are mostly handling larger legacy devices like CRT TVs, a growing number of smaller electronics like smartphones and tablets have started to reach their facilities. This creates new challenges, as these devices are often difficult and time-consuming to take apart. Instead of salvaging potentially valuable components like the motherboard, recyclers typically remove the battery and shred the rest. Precious materials are lost in the process, and all of the energy that went into manufacturing components needs to be expended again to create new ones.

For several years, scientists have been exploring whether artificially intelligent robots could streamline the recycling process, making the recovery and reuse of parts from dead consumer electronics more economical. In December, the idea received a high-level boost when the US Department of Energy awarded a $445,000 grant to researchers from Idaho National Laboratory, the University of Buffalo, Iowa State University, and e-waste recycler Sunnking to develop software that allows robots to automatically identify different types of smartphones on a recycling line, remove the batteries, and harvest various high-value components. By the end of the two-year research project, the team hopes to field-test an early version of its technology at one of Sunnking’s facilities — after which it may pursue additional funding to commercialize robotic smartphone recyclers.

Amanda LaGrange, CEO of the St. Paul-based e-waste recycler TechDump, says that the work these researchers are doing is critical for improving the sustainability of consumer electronics, which contain valuable metals and minerals that today’s crude recycling processes don’t recover. “Finding ways, like these scientists are with robots, of trying to reclaim rare earth metals is so important,” LaGrange tells The Verge. “Also, my jaded self is not convinced it can be done at scale at this point.”

Indeed, applying robotics and AI to e-waste recycling is a fairly new idea, and there aren’t a lot of practical examples of it working. The best-known example is Apple’s much-hyped line of recycling robots, but only a few versions of these robots are out in the wild, they only work on iPhones, and their impact on Apple’s overall e-waste remains murky at best. A jack-of-all-trades version that could be installed at an e-waste facility processing dozens of different models of smartphones has not been commercialized yet. The new research project aims to show that such a robot is, at least, possible to develop.

Various research teams will take the lead on different robotic recycling capabilities. Researchers at INL will focus on developing methods for removing batteries from smartphones using a robotic arm. In parallel, researchers at the University of Buffalo and Iowa State University will identify higher-value components, like circuit boards, cameras, and magnets, that can be removed from dead phones using the same robots and find or develop hardware to do the actual smartphone surgery.

The robots don’t just need good hardware, but software that allows them to quickly recognize different phone types and look up their internal anatomy. For this part of the project, Iowa State University researchers and Sunnking will be developing a database that includes 2D images and 3D scanning data on various makes and models of smartphones. Using a machine learning approach, that database will train the software guiding the robots to locate the phone’s battery and high-value components and extract them.

“We’re going to train that system to look at phones and say, ‘This is an iPhone, this is a Samsung model XYZ,’ then go to a database and say, ‘This is where we’re going to cut the battery out,’” says INL’s Neal Yancey, the principal investigator on the project.

Eventually, the researchers hope to have a smartphone-stripping robot that can be plugged into existing e-waste recycling operations. Sunnking, which will be providing 100 samples of five different phone models for the researchers to experiment with, will be the first to test that system out toward the end of the two-year project window. 

At the same time, researchers at INL will analyze the economics of the entire robotic disassembly process to determine if it actually reduces recycling costs. The team’s goal is to improve materials recovery by at least 10 percent and recycling economics by at least 15 percent compared with standard recycling operations today.

Even those seemingly modest goals may be difficult to achieve. Adding specialized robotic arms to e-waste operations where phones are currently taken apart by hand will require a potentially sizable up-front investment. (The cost of robotic arms can vary widely, but the popular UR5 series sell for upwards of $35,000 apiece.) And with most of today’s robots designed for simple, repetitive tasks rather than the precision work of removing tiny phone parts, developing a robot that can measure up to its human counterparts in terms of disassembly speed and accuracy is no small feat, says Minghui Zheng, a roboticist at the University of Buffalo and co-principal investigator on the project.

“There are lots of limitations of robots,” Zheng says. Basic tasks, like using robotic grippers to pull out small components, could be “very challenging,” she says.

Developing AI-based software tools that can sift through the complex mixture of dead devices in an e-waste stream and accurately classify them could also prove challenging, although similar tools exist for sorting through solid wastes like plastic. Other groups are also attempting to develop AI-based e-waste sorting methods, including Carnegie Mellon University’s Biorobotics Lab, which recently worked with Apple on one such project.

Even if the initial research is promising, more work will be needed before AI-powered robots are a practical solution for handling the estimated 150,000 tons of portable consumer electronic waste Americans produce each year (a figure including not just smartphones but tablets and wearables like Apple Watch). With the initial project focused on just five of the hundreds of smartphones out there, the tech will need to be developed further to be practical for most recyclers. To process large volumes of smartphones in an industrial setting, the system will also need to be scaled up.

Product design changes could create another barrier to robotic recycling. As companies tweak their devices year after year, recycling robots will need to be kept up to date with hardware and software capable of handling the latest models. An e-waste recycler that’s considering investing in such technology might reasonably worry that in 10 years, new phone designs will have rendered the robots obsolete.

That’s why it’s so important that recyclability is baked into product design, says Sara Behdad, a sustainable electronics researcher at the University of Florida who’s not involved with the new research project. While Behdad says that greater use of robots could improve e-waste recycling “a lot,” she believes that many of the issues plaguing recyclers today, from glued-in batteries to proprietary screws, should be addressed through design for disassembly standards.

Such an approach would mean “less uncertainty” for recyclers in the future, Behdad says. And taking phones apart would be “much more within the capabilities of robots.”

Companies like Apple and Samsung aren’t the only ones making high-tech devices that are hard to take apart and recycle. So are the manufacturers of critical clean energy technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicle (EV) batteries — and unlike the consumer tech industry, which is slowly starting to reverse some of its unsustainable design practices, there isn’t much being done about it.

Batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines are all essential tools for combating climate change. However, these technologies take considerable energy and resources to make, and the best way to ensure we can keep making more of them sustainably is to recycle those resources at end of life. But today, clean energy recycling is limited by design choices that hinder disassembly, including the widespread use of ultra-strong adhesives. That could change, experts say, if the companies manufacturing supersized batteries for EVs and rare earth magnets for wind turbines shifted toward new adhesives that can be “de-bonded” using light, heat, magnetic fields, and more, or toward glue-free designs.   

“Design for recycling hasn’t really come to that market yet,” says Andy Abbott, a professor of chemistry at the University of Leicester who recently co-authored a review paper on de-bondable adhesives and their potential use in clean energy.

Instead, Abbott says, manufacturers tend to “overengineer” their products for safety and durability. Take EV batteries, which are composed of anywhere from dozens to thousands of individual, hermetically-sealed cells glued together inside modules and packs. While the heavy use of adhesives helps ensure the batteries don’t fall apart on the road, it can make them incredibly difficult to take apart in order to repurpose individual cells or recycle critical metals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel.

“At the moment, because everything is bonded together, lots of batteries end up getting shredded,” study co-author Gavin Harper, an EV battery recycling expert at the University of Birmingham in the UK, tells The Verge. “The material is mixed together, which makes subsequent steps in the recycling process more complicated.” 

Solar panels and wind turbines are also designed for durability in ways that make recycling challenging. Most solar panels are composed of silicon cells coated in layers of polymer sealants that bind the cells to weatherproof glass and plastic covers. While this electronic sandwich design means the panels can spend decades on a rooftop exposed to the elements, the adhesives and sealants used throughout the panel make it hard to separate the components cleanly at end of life. The rare earth magnets inside wind turbine generators, meanwhile, are coated in resins and glues that can create significant contamination for anyone looking to reclaim and reuse the material. A single wind turbine can contain hundreds of pounds of rare earth elements, and demand for these metals is set to skyrocket as the world builds more EVs and more turbines.

Abbott says manufacturers are just starting to wake up to the fact that recovering the critical materials inside clean energy technologies is important for shoring up long-term supplies — and that new design approaches are needed to facilitate that. “Really only in the last 18 months or so, that conversation has started to raise its head,” he says.

Abbott and Harper’s new paper lays out a number of potential paths toward a more recyclable clean tech sector. While solar manufactures are unlikely to eliminate adhesives any time soon, the authors suggest manufacturers could move toward adhesives and sealant materials that can be unstuck using chemicals, magnetic fields, or even a high-frequency sonic pulse. For wind turbine magnets, an adhesive that loses its stickiness in the presence of a strong magnetic field won’t work, but one that could be melted away using heat, or de-bonded when exposed to ultraviolet light, might be viable.

Designs that use fewer adhesives could help improve EV battery recycling immensely. If batteries were easier to take apart down to the individual cells, Harper says it could make it easier to recover critical materials inside the cathode, including lithium, which is rarely recycled today. And at least one company is already commercializing an adhesive-free battery design: In 2020, Chinese battery manufacturer BYD announced a new “Blade Battery,” which features long, skinny cells that clip into the main battery pack without the use of glue. “In terms of disassembly, it’s trivial,” Abbott says. “The cells just clip out.” 

For EV battery makers who don’t want to ditch glue-based designs, there are “a huge number of methods out there” that could lead to a more de-bondable adhesive, says Jenny Baker, a battery storage expert at Swansea University in the UK. The challenge, in her view, will be developing adhesives that can be unstuck quickly, in a process that can be done on an industrial scale.  

“The thing is now to take some of the science and try and move it into the engineering side so that we can get it ready for really large-scale recycling because we know there’s going to be a lot of these batteries coming through,” Baker says. Based on projected growth in EV and energy storage markets, Harper has estimated that by 2040, there could be about 8 million metric tons of battery waste in need of recycling around the world. A similar amount of solar e-waste could flood recycling plants by 2030.

To convince manufacturers (and consumers) to adopt more recycling-friendly adhesives and adhesive-free designs, Baker says they will need assurances that the alternatives don’t compromise product durability or lifespan, which in the clean tech sector is often measured in decades. She suspects that many new designs will have to be “road tested” in products with a shorter lifespan where premature failure is “less of a risk.” 

That could include consumer technology markets, where sustainability-oriented companies like Framework and Fairphone are already rolling out modular and adhesive-free laptops and phones intended to be taken apart easily. Even industry titans like Apple and Dell have recently announced ambitious goals and product concepts focused on recyclability. Abbott has already had preliminary talks with a phone manufacturer about glues that can de-bond a screen much more easily, although he says the company hasn’t yet embraced the idea.

Ultimately, manufacturers may be forced to overcome their reluctance to tweak product designs for recycling if policymakers start to mandate it or if the world faces shortages of the metals and minerals needed to build these technologies. As the clean energy transition causes demand for high-tech metals to spike, Baker says that companies are going to have to start getting more creative about where they source from.

“If you can get [a resource] but it’s a really high price, that’s bad, but you can pass the price onto the consumer,” Baker says. “If you can’t get it at all, you have no business.”