Metal recycling : opportunities, limits, infrastructure

Metal recycling is a complex business that is becoming increasingly difficult!

Recycling started long ago, when people realized that it was more resource- and cost-efficient than just throwing away the resources and starting all over again.

In this report, we discuss how to increase metal-recycling rates - and thus resource efficiency - from both quantity and quality viewpoints.

The discussion is based on data about recycling input, and the technological infrastructure and worldwide economic realities of recycling.

Decision-makers set increasingly ambitious targets for recycling, but far too much valuable metal today is lost because of the imperfect collection of end-of-life (EoL) products, improper practices, or structural deficiencies within the recycling chain, which hinder achieving our goals of high resource efficiency and resource security, and of better recycling rates.