EARTH (Plenary lecture)

[21101-05-05] Technological Strategy for the Next Generation Urban Mining in Japan

○Tatsuya Oki¹ (1. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology)

Keywords:Urban mining, Metal recycling, Physical separation, Strategy, Japan

Metal materials have been imported and consumed by 120 million Japanese for decades, and such materials have accumulated in the nation’s territory. However, concentrations of such materials cannot properly be called urban mines until the resources can be retrieved with economic viability. While natural mines are formed by the gradual concentration of resources over incredibly long periods of time, urban mines are artificially created, by gathering and concentrating large amounts of waste products. In other words, urban mining strategies must reduce the entropy of used metal dispersed over the land. However, no one has ever extracted minor metals as individual elements from waste products. In order to achieve efficient and coordinated urban mining, it is necessary to construct a society-wide system that introduces product eco-design and physical separation technologies utilizing artifact databases. For this purpose, in 2013, the new “Strategic Urban Mining Research Base (SURE)” was established at AIST. And also, the SURE consortium, including among its members companies related to metal resource circulation, was organized in 2014 with the aim of achieving accelerated economically viable strategic urban mining based on the identified needs of industry and society. In 2015-2016, AIST and the cooperation companies started the project ”Circulation controllable resources reproduction technology by artery-vein industrial cooperation” under the energy-environmental new technology leadership program in NEDO. Then, we also started the NEDO project “Research and development of the recycling technology to construct high efficiency resources circulation system” from 2017. In this project, we develop automation physical separation technologies for waste products including electronic devices, and metals recovery technologies for small amount materials. In this speech, I shall explain the achievement of metal recycling by the technology innovations and the efforts to construct “strategic urban mines”.