Recycling metals

Recycling metals

• Advantages:
• Natural reserves of ores will last longer
• Less mining - mining damages the landscape and creates noise and dust pollution
• Less pollution - sulfur dioxide produced when metals are extracted from metal sulfide ores
• Less energy needed to recycle metal than to extract it from its ore
• Less waste metal in landfill sites
• Disadvantages:
• Sometimes more expensive than extracting new metal
• Large amounts of money and energy used in collecting, transporting and sorting metals to be recycled

Life cycle assessment

• Carried out to work out the environmental impact of a product
• Helps people to decide whether it is worthwhile to manufacture and recycle a certain product
• Can be compared the effect of using different materials to make the same product - eg Which is more environmentally friendly - producing a bottle from plastic or from glass?
• Use of water, resources, energy sources and production of some wastes can be fairly easily quantified.
• Allocating numerical values to pollutant effects is less straightforward and requires value
• judgements, so LCA is not a purely objective process.
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Ways of reducing the use of resources

• Some products, such as glass bottles, can be reused.
• Glass bottles can be crushed and melted to make different glass products.
• Metals can be recycled by melting and recasting or reforming into different products.
• The amount of separation required for recycling
• depends on the material and the properties required of the final product.
• For example, some scrap steel can be added to iron from a
• blast furnace to reduce the amount of iron that needs to be extracted from iron ore.
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