The Future of Scrap Metal Recycling and How It Can Cut Harmful Emissions
08 August 2022When inspecting the materials used in most household appliances today, many people would notice the abundance of metal components. Metals can likewise be seen in industrial equipment and tools, vehicles, aircraft, and ships. The structural components of buildings are even made from various types and shapes of metals.
One thing that makes metals useful is they are robust. They do not get damaged by outdoor elements easily, allowing them to last for a long time. They are also machinable and cleanable. But one aspect of metals that is often overshadowed by their other benefits is their recyclability.
Even with multiple processes, metals can be recycled without losing their durable and appealing properties. This quality alone makes them helpful in sustaining the needs of industries for many years. It then allows scrap metal recycling to continuously thrive today.
The Power of Circular Economy
A circular economy is a model of production that repurposes or reuses existing materials and products for as long as possible. This model can even involve sharing, leasing, repairing, and refurbishing common goods to exhaust their value. One of the purposes of this model or approach is to minimise the extraction of raw materials. A circular economy can likewise cut waste and pollution and allow natural systems to regenerate.
All these purposes can benefit businesses, organisations, and individuals, especially once natural systems have regenerated and renewed some of their resources.
With the louder push towards adopting the circular economy, the scrap metal recycling industry can easily provide the metal supply needs of industries as long as they are provided with scrap products. Its recycling phases, after all, only require less energy than the traditional raw metal extraction, refinement, and transportation.
Rising Demand for Green Metals
Metals that have been recycled are often utilised in producing another batch of parts and products by different industries. The construction industry, for instance, uses recycled metals in generating beams and other components of building structures. These metals are likewise used in creating various furniture pieces, storage options, and other similar things.
The automotive and electronics industries, alternatively, use recycled metals in producing the tiny components of appliances, devices, tools, and vehicles. These metals are even used in creating the chassis of these things.
Now, as the world continues to support the call for sustainability, many of these industries have geared toward green metals. Green metals are products that possess the lowest total life cycle carbon emissions over their entire lifespan. Fortunately, metals recycled today do not generate a lot of carbon emissions throughout their life cycle, which makes these metals part of the green metal category.
Reducing the Harmful Emissions
Despite utilising green metals such as aluminium, copper, nickel, and zinc, the scrap metal recycling industry should still carry out processes that do not generate too many harmful emissions. The energy used by many recycling plants still relies on coal or natural gas, which are both known for emitting harmful elements. And even if some plants want to fully switch to electrical power, the energy source of their electricity supply may still yield harmful emissions.
Hence, the only way to cut harmful emissions, for now, is to continue processing scrap metals. The harmful emissions this process produces, after all, are much smaller than those generated by raw metal extraction and processing.
Victoria Metal Traders are buyers of all grades and all quantities of Ferrous and Non-Ferrous metals. We buy scrap metal from all areas of Victoria and we export globally. Contact us for all your scrap metal needs.
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