Landfills are becoming large concentrations of materials like plastic, aluminum and other. What part of the process of mining landfills and processing the materials for new products, makes mining raw materials from the earth and processing them cheaper?

Question

Landfills are becoming large concentrations of materials like plastic, aluminum and other. What part of the process of mining landfills and processing the materials for new products, makes mining raw materials from the earth and processing them cheaper?

In: Economics

Answer 1

Extracting materials from the landfill is a tedious task. First you have to sort the materials, and because most products are not designed for disassembly, you have to go through a lot of processes to to extract the materials you need. Extracting gold from a circuit board, first demands that you are cutting out the right components. Then dissolving these components in chemicals to get to the gold alloys, then dissolve the alloy to make new chemical bonds that leaves the gold as leftover. Then purifying the gold. In the end it’s a very long and expensive process, and the cost benefit is low.