Special and precious metals are key ingredients for high tech applications like information technology, electronics, or car-catalysts, and emerging clean technologies such as photovoltaics, fuel cells or electric car batteries. With a relatively recent use in mass applications, 80% or more of the cumulative mine production for e.g. the Platinum Group Metals (PGM), gallium, or indium took place just in the last 30 years. A future sufficient access to these 'technology metals' is essential. Their primary production is often coupled to base metals and concentrated in few mining regions of the world, causing a complex demand-supply balance and high price volatility. Hence it is necessary to secure their resource efficient use along the lifecycle and to establish effective recycling systems to "close the loop", preserving limited resources. Appropriate management at the product's end-of-life however is challenging. Most consumer products are characterized by an "open cycle" with non transparent global flows and multiple owners along the lifecycle, a complex material composition, and demanding collection and recycling chains. The contribution addresses these issues from a holistic perspective and elaborates the system interdependencies and potential ways of improvement. On the example of precious metals it will be shown that in many cases effective recycling technologies exist but that the majority of consumer products do not enter in such recycling chains so far.
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