Worth of metal-gleaning in mining and recycling for mineral conservation

摘要

Mitigating mineral extraction is considered as an important challenge for prolonged resource supply and environment protection at mining site. This challenge can be promoted by retaining metal resources within technosphere with adequate technologies and policies for reducing losses to environment. In mining and mineral processing, considerable amount of metals is turning into tailing loss. While in recycling, metal recovery from end-of-life products is limited due to the economic and technological restriction. In this study we evaluate the latency for mitigating mineral extraction by reducing loss rate in mining and recycling. Comparative analysis between seven metals is presented using the result of global substance flow analysis (SFA), which indicates different significance of promoting recycling. Furthermore, change in latency toward future is discussed in combination with dynamic SFA. The framework of this study will support a sustainable metal use by introducing the right technologies and policies at the right time.