RAW MATERIALS INDUSTRY RECYCLES 'ABOVE-GROUND RESOURCES'

Japan's raw materials industry has been turning to recycling businesses in response to the enactment of various recycling laws, heightened citizens' awareness on waste issues and the shortage of landfill sites in recent years. The industry mainly consists of businesses that deal with iron and steel, nonferrous metals, chemicals, ceramics, rock and soil, paper and pulp, fabrics, and petroleum and coal. They supply materials for architecture, construction, processing and assembling industries.

Materials play an important role in resource cycles. Companies in the raw materials industry have launched recycling businesses for their own survival during the current long-lasting economic slump. The resources they find in waste are known as "above-ground resources," a new term coined to recognize the value in industrial waste and byproducts as resources above the ground, as opposed to resources buried in the ground.

Below are some examples based on the information provided by Professor Tadahiro Mitsuhashi of the Chiba University of Commerce, also a director of Japan for Sustainability.

At Taiheiyo Cement Corporation, one of the leading cement manufacturers in Japan, industrial waste containing environmentally hazardous substances is completely decomposed and recycled by utilizing the heat of over 1450 degrees Celsius generated during high-temperature calcination of limestone and clay to produce cement. The company also utilizes used tires and used Japanese pinball machines as supplementary fuels as well as coal ash from thermal power plants, sludge from sewage, ash residue from urban waste incinerators, and so on.

Normally, cement plants are built to produce cement on a mass scale. However, Ichihara Eco-Cement Corporation, Taiheiyo Cement's affiliate, newly established with an aim of recycling incineration ash from big cities as well as various kinds of sludge, began operations in 2001. Incineration ash from urban waste, which is rich in limestone, clay, silica, and iron, turns into the perfect raw materials for cement. This environmentally friendly cement is known as eco-cement, and its high quality meets JIS (Japan Industrial Standards) requirements. It can be used for various purposes, just as ordinary cement.

Even if it can sell all of its cement products, Ichihara Eco-Cement Corporation cannot make it a profitable business with that cement alone. The company makes profits by treating sludge and ash residue from waste incineration in Chiba Prefecture. The plant is designed to produce eco-cement by recycling incineration ash, dust and other waste generated in garbage disposal facilities, by adding the minimum amount of natural materials.

Masatsugu Taniguchi, an advisor to the company, says, "Our main business is to treat waste in the cement kilns. Its by-product, cement, is also marketable." This statement reflects an on-going shift in the company's mission.

Dowa Mining Company also has its focus on the recycling business to extract various minerals from heaps of industrial waste such as electronic appliances and automobiles, using the refining technologies it has accumulated over many years. Its subsidiary, Kosaka Smelting & Refining Company, is the only refinery for complex sulfide ore in Japan. Thanks to this refinery technology, the extraction of many kinds of metal is possible.

After chlorofluorocarbons, plastics, and iron scraps are sorted and collected from electronics waste in a nearby home electronics recycling plant, the remnants are delivered to the Kosaka Refinery. They fed into the system, together with shredder dust and other waste collected by other companies, to recover 17 kinds of metal, including gold, silver, and copper. The extracted ingots of high purity are used as raw materials for new products.

In addition, the paper industry in Japan has been recycling newspapers and magazines into used-paper pulp for years. While the visible surface of thick, white paperboard often used for product packages is finished beautifully in white, the invisible middle layers are usually made of used-paper pulp.

The Kanto Mill Ichikawa Factory of Hokuetsu Paper Mills is solely responsible for recycling paper waste from the City Hall of Ichikawa into envelopes, notebooks and the like to be used there. The factory is located in an urban area encompassing Tokyo, Chiba Prefecture, Saitama Prefecture, etc., that produce a large quantity of useful wastepaper. Thanks to the advantageous location for transportation, almost all of the factory's total monthly production of 12,000 tons of white paperboard is derived from used paper.

Mr. Mitsuhashi says, "the Hokuetsu factory looked like a storehouse of used paper. At the Taiheiyo Cement factory, numerous automobile tires were piled up. At the Dowa Mining refinery, there were stacks of used electronic appliances. When you visit these factories, you realize that waste is a resource."

Lots of resources are used to make products around us. For example, a mobile phone weighing 100 grams contains 0.018 grams of gold, 0.189 grams of silver, 13.7 grams of copper, and 0.014 grams of palladium. Since one ton of gold ore in Japan produces only about 50 grams of gold, extracting 280 grams of gold from one ton of used mobile phones can be considered a very efficient way to produce gold. The 3,000 tons of mobile phones discarded annually in Japan should produce 840 kilograms of gold!

We can thus regard these resources around us as "above-ground resources." Japan has limited underground resources, but abundant above-ground resources. The raw materials industry's technology to recover resources from waste may allow the country's economy to run smoothly in the future by recycling above-ground resources alone, without the need to mine underground resources or cut trees.

(Junko Edahiro)

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