The Environment Ministry has drawn up a list of 45 compact home and electric appliances, such as mobile phones and digital cameras, that it plans to recycle to recover precious and rare metals.
Under a system known as “urban mining,” municipalities will work with processing dealers and refiners to recover such metals as gold, silver, copper, zinc and palladium used in the devices.
The ministry will study recycling methods for rare metals before submitting a bill to the ordinary Diet session next year.
It chose the 45 items after concluding that they could be profitably recycled without charging consumers.
The ministry submitted an outline of its plan to the Central Environment Council’s panel on the recycling system for small appliances on Monday.
According to the ministry, 284,000 tons of 14 kinds of recyclable metals, worth 87.4 billion yen, are believed to be contained in 97 kinds of compact appliances that are thrown away every year.
However, between 21 percent to 61 percent of discarded compact appliances are disposed of as nonburnable garbage. Many of these appliances end up in landfills.
Under the new system, municipalities will collect used compact appliances in cooperation with retailers, appliance makers, haulers, intermediate processing dealers, refiners and citizens. They will designate certain days for collecting them or set up containers for collection.
Firms that commit to the recycling system for a certain period will receive permits to collect and transport such recyclable metals.
The ministry calculated the value of gold, iron, copper and aluminum in each home appliance per kilogram to prove that recycling the 45 items would be profitable.
If 30 percent of the designated home appliances are collected nationwide, 1.86 billion yen would be collected through urban mining, according to ministry projections.
Some municipalities have already started extracting metals from compact appliances.
The Toyota city government in Aichi Prefecture designates a once-a-month metal garbage recycling day, collecting about six tons of recyclable home appliances each month.
The campaign has led to a reduction of the amount of copper and lead in the waste, cutting the cost of chemicals used to counter these metals in the landfill by 40 million yen annually.
Despite positive examples, it is difficult to promote recycling efforts on a large scale because those involved in such projects have to obtain permits from individual municipalities under the Waste Management Law to engage in recycling. The turbulent prices of mineral resources also hampers this effort.
Source: Daily Yomiuri Online