Japan chants recycling mantra to do without China rare earths

TOKYO (Scrap Monster): Japan has had a really bad situation in 2010 when the monopolistic China stopped rare earth supply to Japan on some diplomatic spat between the countries.

From that day Japan had been on a search to find alternative sources of rare earths, and finally they found out that recycling might be the best way out of the situation.

In the mean time, Japan identified a few facts about rare earth recycling and explored its potentials..

Recycling is expensive, but the rising prices can help on this.

It is very costly to collect and accumulate scrap for recycling. Merits of scale don’t work with these metals.

Japan has been instrumental in getting the recycling of REs underway and has both instituted subsidies and facilitated inter-industry cooperation.

The Japanese Ministry of Trade has provided a third of a billion dollars in subsidies, which has been used as seed money for some 160 projects worth $1.34 billion. That number will increase as the Japanese government is offering another 8.9 billion yen in subsidies in the next fiscal year.

The Japanese have set a goal of reducing the amount of REs imported by its domestic industry by one third.

Japan is also investing heavily in research. Scientists at the University of Tokyo recently succeeded in separating REEs from neodymium magnets through a new, much cheaper recycling process.

And a joint project by Morishita Jintan Company and Osaka Prefecture University has created a recycling process using microbes to recover rare metals such as palladium and indium. There is some hope it can be used for REs as well.

Many Japan companies have taken on different challenges in the recycling of REEs.

A kind of new industry has put up to effectively recover rare earths from electronics, for eg: Dowa Holdings, one of Japan’s oldest mining companies, recently built a large recycling plant in Kosaka in order to extract REs and other critical and valuable metals from melted down electronics components.

If Japan succeeds in all of the country’s rare earth recycling plans, this would be revolutionary step and China would even have to turn towards them for such technologies.