Mining garbage

http://aconstrainedvision.blogspot.com/

With precious metals fetching high prices these days, some environmentalists are thinking creatively:

At IBM's recent Global Innovation Outlook conference, which brought together some big thinkers to hatch breakthrough ideas about the environment and other problems, one speaker captivated the audience by suggesting we could treat landfills as though they were mines--and dig up the valuable metals buried in them.

And there's plenty to dig for, says Patrick Atkins, the director of energy innovation at Alcoa [the world's leading producer of aluminum]. North American landfills contain more aluminum than we can produce by mining ores. He thinks the same is probably true of gold and copper, which are used in the circuit boards of computers and electronic gadgets. One ton of scrap from discarded PCs contains more gold than can be produced from 17 tons of gold ore--and humans throw away 20 million tons of electronic waste a year. Americans dispose of 50 million computers annually; by the end of this decade, the Japanese alone will have trashed 610 million cell phones.

The idea is not new, but the high metal prices, new technology, and Alcoa's interest are making it more likely to become reality.