One particular problem with informal scrap collection and recycling, particularly when it is done by travelling people, is that some of the 'scrap' that is collected tends to be still required by its original owners, and still an operating part of the local infrastructure. It is unfortunate that these people suffer as outsiders and seen as criminal by the more sedentary, but a significant minority of them are just that.

In extreme cases copper natural gas pipes or electricity wires are removed, leading to power cuts or gas explosions.

In the near future I see this becoming a worse problem as we go through powerdown, to the point where the infrastructure damage costs more energy to repair than is saved by valid recycling.

Just part of the reason powerdown needs to be planned to avoid it becoming collapse.

In the UK recycling is down fairly efficiently at the local council level, at least in my area.

Poly ethelene terapthalate (PET)would be a good material to recycle.

It is used for soda pop bottles. It has outstanding properties and can be re-worked.

It appears impervious to degredation. There are mechanical masticators (say it carefully!) that heat the plastic and turn it into bubble gum like substances that can be saturated with gas under pressure, which when released, foams up to form a wood like material.

I believe that the masticators are made in Slovakia.

I took several electric motors to the garbage tip the other day. You could see bright copper windings inside the rotor housing. However when people are paid $20 an hour it is just not worth the delicate task of separating the copper. Of course garbage tips now contain mercury from expired and crushed CFL bulbs and radioactive isotopes from smoke alarms.

In my opinion we should not worry about mining garbage dumps. The only mineral I believe will run short by 2050 is concentrated phosphate. I'm not worried about lithium, indium and so on because they have substitutes unlike phosphate. We should worry about food and base level human welfare.

While many metals pose daunting problems with regard to recycling, steel is clearly not one of them.

The article states: "Recycled steel contains plenty of contamination in the form of different metals and can be used only for some specific tasks."

This statement is inaccurate and highly misleading. Steel is by far the most widely recycled metal. According to Wiki, in 2007 in the US 78% of steel was recycled. In the year 2000, this amounted to some 60 million metric tons. Roughly 97% of discarded structural steel is recycled, and effectively 100% of the steel in scrapped automobiles is recycled. By recycling steel, energy consumption is cut by roughly 75%. This is one reason the practice is so widespread.

It should also be noted that on a weight basis, by far most of the steel produced is plain old low-carbon steel. As such, metallic contaminants are generally not an obstacle to quality control, as most of these are removed in the molten slag. Metallic contaminants might be a problem in the production of certain special high-alloy steels, but these represent but a small fraction of total steel production.

Bottom line: Don't worry too much about steel.

Unrelated comment: It is difficult enough to economically separate and recycle materials from municipal waste streams as they are made available for disposal, but trying to actually mining those same materials from the waste present in existing landfills has got to be an exercise in futility.

At a 75% recycle rate, 5.6% of the original is left after 10 cycles, not 0.1%.

.75^10=0.0563

at 24 cycles it is 0.1%

It seems to me that a lot more needs to be done before stuff ends up on the scrap heap. We used to repair stuff, TVs, appliances, etc. Now we just throw them out. Stuff is no longer designed to be repaired. Once stuff is thrown on the scrap pile, it is mixed in with a lot of other stuff, and already a big problem is created.

One of the greatest crimes -- well, no, these days it pales, and there are so many -- is (was) the cash-for-clunkers program. The engines of the old cars were destroyed by pouring sodium silicate in them. Also the use of generic parts, standardized sizes and replacement is needed. And after this long life comes to end, cannibalization is the next step, because some parts will still have life left in them. Standardization would facilitate all this.

And when parts or wholes do finally die, they should still not go on the scrap heap, but to special sites.

Waste and difficult re-use and recycling is built into so much of our technology. We could stretch things out (a lot?) longer with designs that took these things into account.

While at the other end of the technical spectrum, plasma incineration has some interesting potential, with the idea being to get back to basic constituent elements. I don't know how the energy usage works out, but its interesting in theory at least.

Another thing to keep in mind is mixing what William McDonough refers to as technical and biological nutrients. Its bad news to mix something like wood fiber, which is biodegradable, with plastics which are recyclable, thus creating something that is neither. Yet these products often get touted as environmentally friendly.

Huntington Beach, CA has, in my opinion, the best trash disposal company around (and it is employee owned). We have tied with Fresno for having the highest rate of diversions in California. Rainbow Disposal: http://www.rainbowdisposal.com/ is launching into converting food scraps into liquid fertilizer, composting of green waste, and is a leader in investigating technologies of gasification to create a fuel for their natural gas fueled fleet of vehicles.

I know virtually nothing about this kind of recycling so I will stick to a very general comment on some of the very general claims made in this article.

One such claim is that mining anthropogenic deposits will never pay well. The reasoning behind the claim is not spelled out so I can only guess at what assumptions lie behind it. My guess is that, other than the extinction of industrial civilization, alternatives to BAU have not been considered by the author.
It is not difficult to imagine a future in which skilled recyclers could be paid quote well. What's needed for that future to come about is for the resource to be valuable. A monetary economy in which people are generally paid for their labor of course would also be needed of course. Is it that hard to imagine?
2008 is portrayed as a time in which prices were high. But it should be obvious to anyone taking the long view that most 2008 commodity prices were very low! The year-to-year movements in prices have little relevance to a process requiring an economic transformation that can only unfold over decades at best (centuries, more likely). Prices are cheap because energy and natural resources are still relatively plentiful, considering generally available technology and skills.
In a monetary economy, you can not expect the powerful and well-connected to get serious about recycling unless there is some monetary incentive. Such an incentive could take the form of artificially high prices brought about by the resource-use constraints that a sustainability-conscious society would impose on its economy. But as long as only the most marginal elements of society are willing to do this work, it will indeed remain very poorly paid.

Other claims made about the lack of energy or money supposedly needed for recycling are common TOD canards. Energy scarcity is precisely what would be required for people to take recycling seriously. As long as energy remains plentiful, exploitation of low-quality natural resources will be an attractive alternative. As to money, the lack of investment in recycling is merely a symptom of the prevailing low prices.

In closing, though what people are pioneering in Brazil sounds great, "waste management" is a bit of oxymoron. Waste is a failure of management... or at least a failure of governance.

I guess that scrap-mining will become a reasonably lucrative business relatively soon.
Even if events result in a fast and major cull, the sheer numbers of people on the planet insure that a substantial portion of the knowledge of humanity will remain extant, at least in the minds of the survivors, and -except for cd's and tapes - the sheer number of our records in print and vinyl etc. should ensure that some of those media survive for a while.

If we should experience a major cull, and those that remain are able to adapt to the world we have created, we will do exactly as we have always done, and go for easy pickings first. And there would be a lot of stuff lying around. It would take some time before that got used up.

So I'm kind of hoping that large-scale garbage tip mining is a long way away. Garbage tip mining would mean we were really out of everything easier to mine.

It seems that the world's bourgeoisie is being enticed into a last fling, pumping a last bubble. That will push oil prices to new extremes, and cause another crash, but this one will be worse, because people will still be feeling the bite of the last one. And there will be more shortages, and worse weather, and more hungry people, more angry people, plus the people who already have quite enough of having western armies on their land, and killing them.
That could launch something quite unexpected, especially in an age of stuttering resources : a lot of high tech weaponry and control systems might become obsolete in the absence of charged batteries. Low tech and small scale endeavors will eventually have an edge on large scale systems(armies, states) they never had before.

Empires are about to fall, and I hope the human spirit will be allowed one more flowering in the revolutions that are bound to follow, but I don't know. Words like social, solidarity, commune are presented as suspect by the media. They want us to be self-sufficient individuals, able to take care of oneself, and just look at all those nice rich people on tv, you could have everything they have if only you work hard enough, or wish hard enough, or suck up hard enough, or whatever you have to do to become rich and maybe even famous. What are the odds that you win the lottery?
In previous revolutions, most participants were poor and uneducated, so they did what came naturally: kick out the bosses (they tried, at least). Today's masses have so much propaganda pointed at them, I wonder if they would be able to do what comes naturally. But I am probably contaminated with the disdain for the masses the elite perpetuate through (especially) higher education. (My first hour in high school : a priest introduces us to school life with the following words: 'You boys are the future elite of the country...' - this is a small farming town secondary school - later most of the us who went to university became arrogant little prats, we were better because we were smarter, and so we not only had the right but the duty to lead the -unfortunately- less educated masses to a bright and pleasant future - they're dumb you see, and they don't know any better. They need smart leaders... The odds are, you are one of those who need leaders.)

Most places have poor recycling practices, presumably for cultural reasons. I think Germany is a good example of a fairly comprehensive waste reduction and recycling system. German companies are responsible for recycling packaging they use for their products. There is a very efficient collection system for paper, packaging as well as organic household waste. In addition, many categories of drink containers are returned to be refilled. Almost all beer bottles are reused, along with water, and most soft-drink bottles. Soft-drinks and water is usually sold in heavy-duty plastic bottles that are cleaned and refilled. Batteries, metals and electronics are also recycled at very high rates. At public events such as festivals, street fairs, etc, drinks and food are mostly served in real dishes and glasses, which are washed and reused on site.

Slightly off topic, but since so many oil drum posters have commented on the need for developed countries to inculude embedded emissions, here is a quote from the BBC news:

Greenhouse gas emissions created by Britons are probably twice as bad as figures suggest, says the government's new chief energy scientist

The article specifically refers to embedded emissions. So once again whist politicians try to mislead the public, our "uninformed" lot of contributers here were once again ahead of the game. The same goes for the financial crisis no one saw it comming, oh yes they did, just not the political elite.

So what about peak oil, most UK politicians responsible for energy policy, particularly the former Mr Wicks, fervently deny this as well.

Good luck.

I've just thought of something and maybe you can help me. It's about a relation between energy invested per mass of refined minerals obtained. For example which is the relation along the years of the energy requiered to obtain 1 ton of copper.

I think such a graphic display would be a nightmare! I bet we now need a huge amount of energy to extract the same amount of copper than the one we needed at the begining of the 20th century.

Does anyone knows if there's such a study?