From London and the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM) comes their newest publication Planning for Integrated Mine Closure: Toolkit.

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Everybody is talking about the Olympics.  Curmudgeon that I am, I have not watched any of it.  But i could not resist taking a pot-shot at Mark Spitz who has endorsed the recycling of gold.  A stupid enough act.  We wish the guy below success—he is slated to do better than Spitz.  And hence I take up a more interesting topic: urban mining and the recycling of metals. 

Scrap metal may just be America’s biggest export according to an article I read over the weekend.  I though old newspaper was the biggest.  Seems there is more money to be made collecting and exporting scrap metal than in mining new metal.  Apparently the price of scrap metal is a better indicator of where the economy is gong than any other commodity.  Amongst the many websites that purport to give scrap metal prices, I found Recyclenet the “easiest” to read.  Not having any feel for scrap metal prices all I could do was compare them to new metal prices.  Seems that price is about 33 percent less for scrap than for new, although the ratio can vary wildly depending on, for example, if it is bulk copper or copper in sealed motors. 

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