What do we really recycle? A systematic literature review of systemic failures and structural misalignments in WEEE recycling between the circular economy, climate mitigation, and critical raw material recovery.

Recycling of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is widely regarded as a cornerstone of circular economy and climate mitigation strategies, reinforced by normalized expectations, institutional routines, and performance metrics. Yet beneath this consensus, recycling systems genuinely succeed on the metrics they are designed to meet while systematically failing to recover the critical raw materials they are institutionally designed to secure. This paper presents a systematic literature review of 55 peer-reviewed studies, extended by a temporal comparison of ten studies from 2023 to 2026 under identical search criteria. The analysis reveals that recycling system failure is a dynamic market-coupling failure, driven by three structural mechanisms which include the optimization penalty, the value inversion paradox, and the purity bottleneck that interacting through a CE-climate design contradiction that subordinates material criticality to carbon and volume proxies. Critically, these mechanisms do not operate in isolation: single-layer interventions worsen adjacent coupling failures, and each product generation cycle deepens the lock-in. This study introduces anticipatory coupling as the missing governance logic, defined as the deliberate design of recovery infrastructure, metric systems, and market instruments in advance of demand shocks rather than in response to them. The primary contribution is demonstrating how metric failure, market inversion, and infrastructure lock-in are simultaneously reproduced across three system layers, and that addressing this moving target requires governance logic commensurate with its compounding trajectory.