Statistics show that since 2000, the world's major metals can be used for 68 years, aluminum for 177 years, copper for 26 years, zinc for 22 years, 46 years for nickel, chromium for 278 years, manganese for 92 years, 78 years for tungsten.
In 2004, China's 10 kinds of commonly used non-ferrous metals production reached 13978500 tons, an increase of 17.53%, is the first in the world for third consecutive years. However, with the rapid growth of production and demand, resources, energy and environmental issues will become more prominent: the current China's aluminum resources, 70% of copper and 30% of the lead and zinc resources are dependent on imports; the total energy consumption of China's nonferrous metals industry has more than 60000000 tons of standard coal, electricity is the main energy of non-ferrous metal production. The increase of the production of nonferrous metals in China mainly depends on expanding the scale of mining, selecting and smelting enterprises, the total amount of pollutants discharged is inevitable, and the waste water, waste gas is toxic, difficult to control, and the utilization rate of solid waste is low.
To realize the sustainable development of nonferrous metals, recycling of resources is an inevitable choice. At present, China's non-ferrous metal resources recycling (total production of recycled non-ferrous metals) accounts for more than 20% of the total production of non-ferrous metals, but the main problems of the industrial scale is small, resource utilization and labor productivity is low, the industry's overall technical level is low, the production process of environmental pollution is serious.
To this end, the need to develop and implement the laws and policies conducive to recycling of resources, and to strengthen research and development, and promote technological progress of enterprises. Recycling and utilization of this piece is basically a spontaneous growth, in the past there is no technological progress, no scientific research. For example, the use of mobile phone battery two hundred or three hundred times can not be used, most of the mobile phone battery is cobalt, cobalt is a rare metal in China, the 8% is on the import, but now the research has just begun. International practice is the government to support the development of resource recycling, China should absorb the experience of some advanced countries, the conditions are ripe, can set up a number of resource recycling technology demonstration base, they are both new technology, new equipment test base, but also a good place for the national resource recycling propaganda.