2007 Volume 123 Issue 12 Pages 779-783
In Japan, the domestic recycling system of the nonferrous metal is formed with two businesses. One is many collecting & sorting enterprises and processing & wholesale enterprises, which are usually small and medium-sized business. The other is nonferrous metal smelting & refining enterprises, which are usually big business. Recently legislative resource recycling system, which consists of Home Appliance Recycling Law, End-of-Life Vehicles Recycling Law, Law for Promotion of Effective Utilization of Resource and so on, has been also developed. But, in spite even in these circumstances, considerable amount of domestic occurrence scraps of copper has been exported to China, and a lot of used home appliances and used personal computers have been exported to foreign countries. Namely, it has become clear that the present resource recycling system could not circulate the resources sufficiently inside Japan.
These problems were caused by rapidly increasing resource consumption of the world in these several years, which was originated by quick economic development of the Asian region, in especial in China. Tightness of worldwide resource demand has requested the advancement of creating new countermeasures and/or corresponding methods under the slogan of “conservation and effective utilization of resources” for a long time.
This manuscript intoroduces these circumstances and suggested some solutions to the problems.
