The advanced recycling technology for realizing urban mines contributing to climate change mitigation

Abstract

Coping with sustainable civilization and utilization of renewable energy, climate change mitigation is one of the big challenges. Obtaining metal resources from urban mines (waste) for supporting the civilization of human races will contribute not only to support sustainable development of civilization society to the future but also to mitigate climate change. Urban mines are one of the promising resources especially for poor natural metal resource countries such as Japan. Fortunately, Japan is one of the major rare metal consumers and also is capable of smelting rare metal by its own. Japan’s urban mine will be more practical with top class recycling technology. In addition to these technological developments, it is necessary to reform the society system in order to realize productive and economical urban mines which overcome the natural mine. Furthermore, in order to continue a steady development of rare metal recycling, it is necessary to conduct well-planned technology development based on the prediction of the future material usage. In this chapter, the authors show the technical subjects for realizing total circulating usage of metal resources including rare metals and an attempt currently tackled in Japan.