|
Ardent Listener
Administrator
USA
4841 Posts |
 Posted - 04/29/2007 : 16:50:39
|
You must be logged in to see this link.
Thar's palladium in them thar dentures
By Yoshifumi Takemoto Bloomberg NewsPublished: April 24, 2007
TOKYO: Isao Miyoshi, a Japanese dental technician, sees opportunity in the buckets full of old dentures at his office in Saitama. The pails hold some of the 3,000 sets of false teeth he has collected from dentists since December for recycling.
"A set of dentures is usually 12 percent gold, 20 percent palladium and 50 percent silver," said Miyoshi, 63. "It struck me we could turn them into money."
Rising prices for precious metals are spurring Japanese to comb through items that used to be discarded as scrap. Recyclers are turning old mobile phones and the 3 million pachinko machines retired each year by gambling parlors into everything from hard-disk drives for Apple iPods and pollution control devices for Toyota Motor cars.
Dowa Holdings and Nippon Mining Holdings, Japan's largest silver and copper smelters, respectively, say they plan to spend a total of ¥23 billion, or $193 million, by 2010 to expand recycling efforts and build new plants.
"Recycling will be steady, profitable business and it is very positive to bet on it," said Masaru Okawa, a metals analyst at Nomura Securities in Tokyo.
Today in Marketplace by Bloomberg
Makers of 'Pulp Fiction' setting up Asia film fundExxon Mobil profit rises 10 percentCelesio to buy DocMorris to build German pharmacy chainThe amount of industrial waste recycled by Japan's 10 biggest metal processors grew 10 percent to 1.64 million tons in the year ended March 2006, according to the Japan Mining Industry Association. That amount has doubled since 1999.
In past years, Japan buried old televisions, digital cameras and computers in landfills or exported them to other countries, including China, for scrap.
Now some discarded goods are more likely to go first to a local prison.
Inmates at Nagoya Jail in central Japan, for example, are dismantling pachinko machines in search of components that contain gold, silver and palladium, said Ayumu Masuda, owner of Mastec Masuda Group, a scrap merchant.
Mastec Masuda, based in nearby Hamamatsu, buys the parts, breaks them down further and sells them to smelters.
Previously, the only pieces of pachinko machines that were salvaged were the liquid crystal displays, said Yoshiro Tanaka, a manager at Nihon Yugiki Kogyo Kumiai, a gaming industry group in Tokyo.
"Over the past two years, because of high metal prices, a single pachinko machine without its LCD panels can fetch ¥300 to ¥500," Tanaka said.
About 18 million enthusiasts play pachinko in Japan, where it is the most popular form of legal gambling.
World metal prices are soaring as China, the world's cheap manufacturing hub, produces more goods like air conditioners and calculators. The country's factory output has expanded 16 percent since 2003, government figures show.
Gold sold for $690.60 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange on Monday, double the price in 2003. Silver has tripled over the same period to $14.17 an ounce and platinum has doubled to $1,320 an ounce.
The metals are used in everything from motherboards that house electronic circuitry in the smallest of consumer goods to chemical filters in factories and catalytic converters for cars.
"The global economy, led by China, has boosted demand for all sorts of things, from jewelry to electronic devices," said June-Pyo Park, a senior commodities trader at Okachi in Tokyo.
Dowa Holdings alone said its profit from recycling metals rose 31 percent to ¥5.62 billion in the last quarter of 2006.
In December, the Tokyo-based company teamed with Tohoku University in northeast Japan, enlisting technical expertise to extract more metals from small items such as mobile phones.
Dowa also persuaded the Akita prefectural government in northwestern Japan to place collection boxes for old electronic devices in some supermarkets and municipal buildings. Japanese must pay to discard goods such as computers and televisions.
"We intend to expand this experiment to other areas in the prefecture," said Shinichi Ono, who manages energy and resources for the prefecture.
Dowa now is looking further afield. The company's chairman, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, has proposed creating an international network for recovering resources from electronic discards.
"We're looking into collecting used mobile phones that have been disposed of in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand," said Shunsuke Mitsuya, a Dowa spokesman.
In his office at Saitama, a prefecture bordering Tokyo, dental technician Miyoshi nurses a sense of achievement.
The Japan Denture Recycle Association he established in December has raised ¥3.3 million from the metal in false teeth and donated it all to UNICEF.
"It's just a pity to see old dentures thrown away," Miyoshi said.
************************
For good times to come or bad times to come, now is the time to save your copper or nickel coins.
|
|
Thar's palladium in them thar dentures
Forum Locked
Posted - 04/30/2007 : 18:35:42
