Sustainable Metals Management

Metals have been vital to human civilization for many thousands of years. Their durability and recyclability should make them ideal materials for a sustainable economy. This book assembles experts from many fields to discuss the conditions and limits of sustainable metals management. The contributors examine the theoretical ideas and goals of sustainability, and apply them across the metal making and trading process.

The sustainable use of natural resources is an important global challenge, and improved metal sustainability is a crucial goal for the 21st century in order to conserve the supply of critical metals and mitigate the environmental and health issues resulting from unrecovered metals. Metal Sustainability: Global Challenges, Consequences and Prospects discusses important topics and challenges associated with sustainability in metal life cycles, from mining ore to beneficiation processes, to product manufacture, to recovery from end-of-life materials, to environmental and health concerns resulting from generated waste. The broad perspective presented highlights the global interdependence of the many stages of metal life cycles. Economic issues are emphasized and relevant environmental, health, political, industrial and societal issues are discussed. The importance of applying green chemistry principles to metal sustainability is emphasized. Topics covered include: • Recycling and sustainable utilization of precious and specialty metals • Formal and informal recycling from electronic and other high-tech wastes • Global management of electronic wastes • Metal reuse and recycling in developing countries • Effects of toxic and other metal releases on the environment and human health • Effect on bacteria of toxic metal release • Selective recovery of platinum group metals and rare earth metals • Metal sustainability from a manufacturing perspective • Economic perspectives on sustainability, mineral development, and metal life cycles • Closing the Loop – Minerals Industry Issues The aim of this book is to improve awareness of the increasingly important role metals play in our high-tech society, the need to conserve our metal supply throughout the metal life cycle, the importance of improved metal recycling, and the effects that unhindered metal loss can have on the environment and on human health.

Provides a comprehensive overview on developing sustainable practices for waste minimization via green metal extraction from waste streams This book introduces readers to sustainable management and defines the challenges as well as the opportunities in waste stream management. It starts by covering conventional technologies for metal extraction then focuses on emerging tools and techniques such as green adsorption, bioleaching, and chelation. It also discusses the scale-up and process intensification of metal extraction from waste streams from process design to pilot plan. Sustainable Metal Extraction from Waste Streams begins by covering sustainability-related constructs and illustrates the pre-requisites for sustainable management of waste streams. It then introduces the basics of solid waste handling, ranging from an analysis of the relevance, categories of wastes, consequences of untreated waste disposal into the environment, government initiatives, management strategies, and unit operations for pre-treatment of wastes. The book also looks at widely accepted, conventional metal extraction technologies like hydro and pyro metallurgical methods; discusses the possibility of sustainable green processes for metal extraction; and introduces the recently deployed coiled flow inverter process. -Provides a comprehensive collection of the conventional, emerging, and future technologies for metal extraction from industrial waste and electrical & electronic equipment in a sustainable way -Demonstrates trans-disciplinary research as an executable direction to achieve the sustainable governance of natural resources and solid waste management -Presents a dedicated section on scale-up and process intensification of metallurgical processes -Summarizes various aspects of novel processes ranging from basic concepts, benchmark performance of technologies on lab scale, and recent research trends in metal extraction Covering a variety of interdisciplinary topics on resource optimization and waste minimization, Sustainable Metal Extraction from Waste Streams is an excellent resource for engineers, science students, entrepreneurs, and organizations who are working in the field of waste management and wish to gain information on upcoming sustainable processes.

The rapid revolution in modern industry has led to a significant increase in waste at the end of the product lifecycle. It is essential to close the loop, secure resources, and join up the circular economy. This book provides a detailed review of extraction techniques for urban mining of precious metals including gold, silver, and the platinum group. The merits and demerits of various extraction methods are highlighted, with possible suggestions for improvements. The feasibility of hybrid extraction techniques, as well as the sustainability and environmental impact of every process, is explored. Offers a comprehensive review of different techniques used in recycling technology for urban mining of precious metals Describes the concept of urban mining and its correlation with circular economy Discusses feasibility of precious metal extraction and urban mines scope and their potential Explains the subject in-context of sustainability while describing chemistry fundamentals and industrial practices Provides technical flow sheets for urban mining of precious metals with diversity of lixiviant This book is aimed at graduate students and researchers in extractive metallurgy, hydrometallurgy, chemical engineering, chemistry, and environmental engineering.

Sustainable Resource Management: Modern Approaches and Contexts presents the application of the current concept of sustainability to the management of natural resources, such as water, land, minerals and metals using theoretical field knowledge and illustrative real-world examples. Initially, the book defines sustainability, detailing its evolution and how it has been adapted to each of the contexts in which it is used. Furthermore, sustainability is made up of three main areas of science—environmental, social and economic—which are rarely considered together. This book is a complete reference guide to sustainability of natural resources for academics, researchers, practitioners and postgraduate-level students, and more. As sustainability is an interdisciplinary field, linked to most sciences, it is also of use to all fields of science that need to maintain sustainable practices and specific details on the methodologies and techniques needed for sustainable resource management. Provides an integrated approach for modern tools, methodologies and indicators for sustainable resource management Evaluates emerging trends and advanced approaches in sustainable resource management, detailing the most up-to-date research and management considerations Describes advanced sustainable resource management technologies and presents case studies where applicable

The pressure is on to enhance corporate reputations, achieve higher operational efficiency, improve planning and control, gain access to mineral resources, build trust with stakeholders, attract financing, recruit and retain a quality workforce, and lower costs. Sustainable Management of Mining Operations provides a holistic, practical approach to achieving these goals. The key, say the authors, is to create a culture within the organization that recognizes the value of sustainability by effectively integrating economic, environmental, and social considerations. Each section of this book focuses on sustainable management from a different perspective, management level, or stage of the mine life cycle. You'll benefit from real-life, practical insights from 27 internationally respected authors whose job titles have encompassed everything from CEO to master mechanic.

This document sets out, within areas of federal jurisdiction, the Government's role, objectives and strategies for the sustainable development of Canada's mineral and metal resources. The Policy builds on relevant federal policy initiatives. It also builds on a document called Sustainable Development and Minerals and Metals: An Issue Paper, which was released by the Minister of Natural Resources in September 1995. This document presents the conceptual foundation for the application of sustainable development to minerals and metals.

This book explains how and where copper and fossil fuels were formed and the likely future for the extraction of copper and coal. The colourful chronology of our efforts to extract metals from minerals and energy from fossil fuels is presented from earliest times until the present day. The difficult concept of human sustainability is examined in the context of continually decreasing real prices of energy and metals. This book integrates the latest findings on our historic use of technology to continually produce cheaper metals even though ore grades have been decreasing. Furthermore, it shows that the rate of technological improvement must increase if metals are to be produced even more cheaply in the future.