As people become more and more dependent on electronic products, ensuring electronic raw materials has become one of the national strategies. However, due to a coronavirus, the mass production of mines around the world has been reduced, threatening the tightening of precious metal supply. Now Japan has begun to strengthen its plan to extract gold from waste, and even spread fishing nets to overseas markets to fight for waste electronic products.
The Nikkei News reported that waste electronic products contain not only a large amount of gold and silver, but also industrial metals such as lithium, which is crucial to the manufacture of electric vehicles. In terms of gold alone, Japan's reserves are estimated to be about 6800 tons, surpassing South Africa's underground reserves.
These waste electronic products can extract non-ferrous metals, precious metals and rare metals. Nonferrous metals are relatively ferrous metals. Commonly used nonferrous metals include copper, aluminum, lead, zinc, nickel, tin, antimony, mercury, magnesium and titanium. Rare metals refer to metals with less content or scattered distribution in nature, including lithium, beryllium, niobium, tantalum, rare earth, germanium, gallium, indium, etc. Precious metals are mainly gold, silver and platinum group metals.
Compared with the high content of precious metals in the circuit board, the profit of recovering rare metals is low. The bottleneck includes the cost of classification, disassembly and extraction, and the process involves a lot of manual work. Japan's metal reserve, which is crucial to the production of electric vehicles and high-tech products, is regarded as a national strategy. The National Institute of advanced industrial science and technology is developing an automatic chemical plant that can disassemble electronic products, retrieve and classify specific metals. The new process will increase the output of manual labor by more than 10 times. It is planned to launch a pilot plant before fiscal year 2021.
The EU has also been developing the concept of sustainable recycling for the past four years. Led by Fraunhofer ILT, a research institution in Aachen, Germany, and eight partners from three countries, the strategic goal is to reduce the EU's dependence on natural resources, reduce the import demand for expensive raw materials, and demonstrate new technologies of reverse production.
The technologies used in the new disassembly plant include laser technology, robotics, vision system and information technology, in which the laser can determine the composition of each part and disassemble, weld or cut parts from the plate in a fast and non-contact manner. Through reverse production technology, the country's dependence on raw materials in other regions can be reduced.
In addition to discarded electronic products, second-hand lithium-ion batteries, especially those used in electric vehicles, are another potential wealth of urban mining. At the end of its service life, lithium-ion car batteries can still be used for other purposes, such as household power storage. Multiple batteries can be connected to build a storage system of renewable energy facilities.
Itochu of Japan cooperates with prand and BYD, Chinese pure electric vehicle battery recycling enterprises, and Marubeni, a Japanese trading company, also invests in byton, a Chinese electric vehicle company, to carry out lithium battery reuse business. The original resources will be exhausted one day. In the face of the surge in high-tech demand in the future, waste electronic products and lithium batteries will become important strategic resources in the future.

随着人们对电子产品的依赖度越来越高，确保电子原料成为国家战略之一，但因为一场冠状病毒，让世界各地的矿山量产减少，威胁到贵金属供应趋紧，日本现在开始加大力度从废弃物中提取金属的计划，甚至将渔网撒向海外市场，展开废弃电子产品争夺战。

日经新闻报道，废弃电子产品不仅含有大量的黄金和白银，还含有对制造电动汽车至关重要的锂等工业金属。仅就黄金而言，日本储量估计约为6,800吨，超过南非的地下矿藏。

这些废弃电子产品可以提取有色金属、贵金属、稀有金属。有色金属相对的是黑色金属，常用的有色金属包括铜、铝、铅、锌、镍、锡、锑、汞、镁及钛。稀有金属是指自然界中含量较少或分布稀散的金属，包括锂、铍、铌、钽、稀土、锗、镓、铟等。贵金属主要为金、银和铂族金属。