Abstract
Recently, although the potential recovery of unused resources from incineration ash has been widely discussed, the source of these unrecovered resources has not yet been adequately studied up to now. In this paper, we discuss the source of gold found in incineration ash using the result of a consumer questionnaire survey on waste generation and its final destination. Among the potential general waste, PCs, game machines, AV equipment and printers are huge potential sources. These are, however, hardly ever treated as combustible wastes and are instead independently treated from other wastes to recover the valuable metals. Therefore, other small but non-negligible wastes should also be used gold sources in incineration ashes, both as combustible wastes and residuals from the pretreatment processes for other type of wastes.
