It's an interesting balance between mining the mine that is the geological mine,
and mining the urban mine,
but there's a very interesting parallel between the two.
Both are mining minerals.
The one designed by nature,
the other one designed by a designer of a product.
The interplay of these two,
the balance between these two,
the extraction of minor elements from geological minerals.
The mining of elements and alloys and materials from
complex consumer products is very much this similar type of activity.
Therefore, if you want to get the balance right,
you have to understand the interaction systemically
between the classical processing route and the recycling processing route,
and they link together in extractive metallurgy.
Ultimately, mining the mine,
whichever one of these,
the urban or the geological mine, ultimately,
it's about producing metals, high quality alloys,
high quality materials that go into products that are truly changing our society.
For the base metals, specifically copper and lead implies that there is a complete,
metallurgical infrastructure that can create refined metal.
On the other hand, the steel segment shows that
if metals flow into it and they don't comply to the alloy specifications,
then that element is in fact lost and it's not
recycled because it's imparting no functionality to that alloy.
If you look at copper, I've made very clear to
you that copper is a refining infrastructure
that releases also elements and makes them available
for high purity recovery by various means.
Hydro mythology and whatever other methods that are available.
The iron side is an infrastructure,
for instance, that is creating alloys.
So very important for the steel industry is to make sure
that wrong elements don't get into their system.
So they have to have very,
very tight control of what they call tramp elements going into
that system because they contaminate the steel and have effects,
so they have to be diluted to levels where it is acceptable.
Consider this drawing and let's do a case.
By considering the complex mineral car,
it's become a highly sophisticated mixture of innovative alloys, materials,
electronics, glued,
bolted, welded together in innovative ways.
Ultimately, when these products specifically of course recycled,
various random events could happen.
Life is never 100 percent cut out.
It's got various variations that could happen. Let's take the following.
A piece of steel is shredded out of that car,
and it by chance envelops the circuit board,
a small circuit board that which are very many in the high-end cars this day.
Let's look at two segments of this drawing and what happens to that.
By chance, the magnet directs
the steel with this printed circuit board to the steel industry.
Obviously, the steel will be recycled but
the possible gold contained within
that printed circuit board will also dissolve in the steel,
but it's potentially lost because ultimately,
the steel industry is trying to create alloys,
a very close specification, and that's the product.
So the feed to a steel plant has to be controlled very
tightly to ensure that these constraints are met.
In this case, we lose the gold.
Let's look at taking that same piece of scrap and it by chance,
gets to the copper recycling chain.
Copper has also the propensity to dissolve gold,
but the beauty of copper is that it is also fairly noble.
Therefore, when you do true refining, you can,
from this mixture of copper and all the dissolved elements,
create pure copper and refined elements at high purity of everything that is of value,
and that is dissolved in there.
Obviously, some elements have no value and they are also lost in
certain phases because of economic reasons or just application reasons.
But in this case, we win the gold, the valuable bit,
but we would lose the iron which would then go to the slag or if we would dissolve it,
it would go into a solution.
But ultimately, that iron is lost from the cycle because most likely,
you will not produce new iron from the slag or from a precipitate, from a solution.
So in summary, each particle that is created in recycling,
each complex mineral has to be understood in
the full complexity of
the available metallurgical infrastructure
to understand where it's ultimately going to land.
If it goes the wrong way, it's lost.
If it goes the right way, you win it.
But you will always win some and you always lose some,
and that's an economic game as well,
and it's also dictated ultimately if there is a use or not for these elements.
So in summary, this drawing is just trying to show that complexity in a visual way,
that one has to take considerable care to look at
this resource efficient recycling in
that depths to ensure that we are maximizing the recovery of those elements we want.
Those we can't get,
at least put them into places where they do not harm nature.
And that's also extremely important activity of this whole resource efficiency.