Recycling is the most frequent lever cited in public and scientific debate to help reach a circular economy. However, end-of-life recycling rate (EOL-RR) of metals seems to be stagnating for decades. In order to understand why, this article takes a look at the literature on limits to base metals recycling, through bibliometric and textual analysis. The goal is two-fold: identifying limits affecting base metals recycling and understanding how the literature about it is structured. We include publications having limits to base metal recycling on end-of-life wastes written in the text, between 2013 and 2023. Our sample comprised of 372 publications, both from scientific and gray literature, illustrate a growing interest in this topic over the years, mostly carried by peer-reviewed articles and reports from various institutions. The results indicate that most limits to recycling are technical or economical by nature, and affect mostly either the recovery step or the overall process at once. The literature itself is focused on OECD countries and overlooks recycling chains in developing countries. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we observe an underlying structure around specific topics, with a focus on batteries, steel recycling and electronic wastes as three notably distinct clusters. Our findings can help policymakers define public policies in order to increase recycling at a global level while reducing side-effects between metals recycling chains, and scholars to close the identified research gaps. • Most limits to base metals recycling are technical or economic in nature, and occur either at the recovery stage or affect the entire process. • Literature favors OECD countries, with little focus on developing countries. • Literature covers high-volume metals, outweighing critical ones. • Age, number of metals, global scope and steel recycling link to more citations. • Future research should address these biases to propose better policy recommendations.
Guy et al. (Tue,) studied this question.