Assessment of Precious Metal Flows During Preprocessing of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment -- Chancerel, Meskers, Hagelüken, Rotter [1].
Here's my summary of the categorisation by mass of 1000 kg of input e-waste (ignoring the uncertainty quantification in the paper):
Category Mass (kg)
------------------------------
Aluminium 22.0
Copper-rich 122.3
Ferrous metals 331.7
Non-Ferrous metals 4.3
Other * 146.4
PCBs 31.6
Plastics 264.8
Precious-metals-rich 52.8
Rubbish, filter dust 24.0
Total 999.9
This paper focuses on the efficiency of the process in recovering precious metals, which would be of interest from an economic perspective to anyone operating the recycling and recover process:
> From the point of view of the process operators, the results of the test can be qualified as “disappointing” because only about a quarter of the gold and palladium and a tenth of the silver are sent to output fractions from which precious metals will be directly recovered. Compared with the recovery rates of major elements such as iron, aluminum, and copper, the recovery rates for precious metals are very low. Most of the precious metals go to the most mass‐relevant fractions (plastics and ferrous metals). These fractions have relatively low concentrations of precious metals (24 g/t of gold and 8 g/t of palladium in the plastics, 24 g/t of gold and 5 g/t of palladium in the ferrous metals; [...] but the considerable mass of the outputs makes the flows of precious metals very relevant.
There are of course other ways to measure the efficiency of a recycling process -- you could focus on energy efficiency, resource efficiency, pollution, etc.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1530-9290...
Here's per-capita E-waste metrics for a subset of countries that might be interesting (because they produce high levels of per-capita E-waste, or have large populations, or both). I've added a median per-capita income column for reference, from Gallup [2].
[1] - https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Climate-Change/Documents/GEM%20...[2] - http://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househol...
Edit: as per the global E waste monitor report, there is a large amount of variability between countries in terms of the rate that e-waste is "collected" versus being disposed of by other methods e.g. in landfill. For example, Norway is at the top of the list in terms of mass of raw e-waste produced per inhabitant, but also has a high e-waste collection rate of 74% . In comparison, Australia only has an e-waste collection rate of 7.5% with the remainder going to landfill.
It'd be interesting to know how effective "collection" of waste is after it is produced versus prevention of that waste in the first place.
There's a bunch of interesting EU e-waste data here [3].
We can see in [4] that Norway's "recycling rate of e-waste", defined as the "collection rate" multiplied by the "reuse and recycling rate" is 50% . From the above table we know that Norway's collection rate is 74% so the "reuse and recycling rate" must be about 2/3 . But, the "reuse and recyling rate" is "calculated by dividing the weight of the WEEE that enters the recycling/preparing for re-use facility by the weight of total treatment of WEEE" -- i.e. it doesn't appear to measure how efficient the recycling and re-use itself is, in terms of output, it appears to just measures how much loss there is before we get to the recycling / reuse stage.
[3] - http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/waste/key-waste-streams/wee...
[4] - http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&plugin=1...