Recovering valuable metals from diffuse consumer waste for low-income communities
open
Global, Global
WS05313
Critical elements are dispersed across billions of small products that are rarely returned or processed properly. The challenge is making collection and recovery convenient, safe, and profitable without exploiting informal workers. The solution must work with limited capital, intermittent services, and local maintenance capacity. The research opportunity is to define measurable success criteria, test the approach in realistic settings, identify failure modes, and create a pathway from prototype to accountable deployment.