Recycling Solutions - Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth's Mineral Resources - page 449

it expected to before 2020. This is because the current recycling rate relies heavily
on the “paying metals”. Recovery e ciencies are also, in the majority of cases, low.
The best recovery rates unsurprisingly include those of the precious metals.
In addition to recycling, urban (or technospheric) mining, i.e. recovering ele-
ments from the technosphere either through in-use, hibernating, landfill, tailing,
slag or dissipation mining, could become a realistic option in the future seing that
ore grades of “anthropogenic mines” are sometimes even greater than natural ones.
It should be noted however, that recycling and urban mining processes are all
subject to the Second Law. So, even if the aim of recycling is the recovery of
materials from waste and in doing so apparently decreasing entropy, the waste
from recyclate sometimes contains more entropy than the initial recyclate, thereby
hindering the salvaging of additional metals. This effect is what the authors term
an Entropic Backfire.
That said, the potential for material and energy savings, not to mention an
avoidance of pollutant emissions is huge. To attain such savings, a holistic view of
lifecycles and recycling chains is needed which means that further research in process
and in end-of-life recovery, eco-e cient design, disassembly and reverse logistics is
required. As is a systematic account of losses and a new way of promoting and
managing material streams.
Such practices are fast becoming part of the most promising industrial sectors of
the near future. A wider web of knowledge, a comprehensive geopolitical framework
of remediation and maintenance and an economic paradigm shift with which to ad-
dress resource scarcity must play an ever important role for its proper establishment.
This is reflected upon in the following chapter.