It’s often overlooked that we do in fact have an extremely large recycling industry, one that isn’t driven by fashionable concerns or heavy handed regulation, but purely by profit.

The world market for scrap metal has seen a massive revival in recent
years. It now involves about 460m tonnes a year, with Europe, North
America and Japan by far the biggest suppliers.

Yes, I know the article says that EU regs have driven it, but cars were recycled for their steel before those regs.

In fact, it’s one of the really rather odd things from the Ur-text of environmentalism, Blueprint for Survival, written by Teddy Goldsmith all those years ago. In it there’s a call for moving from an extraction (or flow) economy to a stock one. Instead of continually digging up virgin materials (and the metals industry is specifically named in this) we should look at what we already have above ground and reuse that where possible/appropriate.

This always did happen with gold for example, and silver: in that latter for example there was a thriving trade in recycling old photographic solutions and even negatives. It’s now sadly dying, along with the rise in digital photography, but I once bought a lorry load of old X-Rays which were then sold to a silver refiner. Such recycling went on because it was profitable, the value of the metals being greater than the cost of transport and their refining.

Something that’s changed since the early 70s is the steel industry though. Back then high grade steels (most especially automotive grade to make car bodies) could not be made from scrap, they had to be made in the huge blast furnaces fed with iron ore. Companies like Nucor have developed the ability to make these high grade steels from scrap: this is really what explains the problems of companies like US Steel and Bethlehem etc. It’s not that they’ve been screwed by foreign competition, it’s that they’re using an old and expensive technology.

Aluminium cans? This recycling sector has become so advanced that you can actually trade in futures of them (Used Beverage Cans or UBC).

As a further example of how far this has gone I once bought three truck loads of (unused, offcuts from) the tubes which the uranium goes into in nuclear reactors. This was shipped to Rotterdam where it ended up being processed into Mag Alloy wheels for boy racers (for the technically minded, the tubes are a zirconium/niobium, Zr/Nb 1.1 %, alloy and the Zr is used as a grain refiner in the secondary aluminium alloys which make such wheels).

So I’m always really rather annoyed with people who say we’ve got t do more recycling because they seem to miss quite how much already goes on. "Recycling" appears to mean to certain people only that which is done with subsidy: the paper, domestic waste and so on, and entirely misses the vastly larger amount that’s done within industry.

Just as an example, gold scrap recycling is some 600 tonnes a year. Or $13 or so billion dollar’s worth.

And all of the above (plus many more involving other metals) are driven purely by profit, by the desire to reclaim valuable materials for reuse.

That’s entirely sensible recycling.

No really great point to all of this, just a small request really. When people talk about recycling, could they actually take note of how much really does go on, rather than only look at the subsidised sector?

And yes, there is something of a political point, albeit a small one, to that. Once we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet, perhaps we might concentrate on why all of this entirely unforced recycling goes on? Because it’s profitable? Why, if we did that we might even question why we’re doing all this forced recycling, the unprofitable kind, the stuff that actually makes us poorer.