Strategies of Materials Industry to Changes of Metallic Mineral Resources and Environment of the Earth
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Strategies of Materials Industry to Changes of Metallic Mineral Resources and Environment of the Earth Yu Wu Department of Electronics and Information Engineering (0903), Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, P.R. China
ABSTRACT With the impending depletion of mineral resources and a worsening environment, the need to enhance energy efficiency and reduce emission of CO2 gas has become a serious global issue. This paper discusses the current condition of metallic ore resources, then lays emphasis on the counter measure of metallic materials processing. The principal metallic materials are iron and aluminum, and in the scrap of these materials there contains metallic resources and deposited huge energy. Through the recycling of the scrap metal, we can reduce the energy consumption on the extraction of these materials and decrease the emission of CO2 gas. The energy consumed in manufacturing products by using reclaimed raw aluminum is only 4.9% of that using new raw materials, and as for iron and steel, the data is 40.7%. In the manufacturing of metal components, while the impurity element content is rigorously restricted in the plastic forming method, the casting method has a much larger permissible range. Thus, remelting and casting is a more appropriate method in the recycling of metallic materials. INTRODUCTION The resources and environmental issue is becoming a major social problem in recent years. The main reason for this problem is the rapid increase of the entire population which leads to the exhaustion of natural resources and the deterioration of the environment [1]. If we let this situation go alone, the survival of the entire human race will be in an irreversible crisis. This is exactly the essence of resources and environmental issue. We can roughly divide the environmental problem into two parts, the CO2 gas problem and detrimental materials problem, such as dioxin. The first part is the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere which results from the excessive burning of fossil fuels, which accumulated through billions of years and burnt by human in the recent 200 years. According to figure 1 [2], the increasing rate of CO2 concentration is identical with the consumption rate of fossil fuels. The second part is the harmful effects of materials such as dioxin, the discussion of this part will not be included at here due to the limitation of paper length. According to reference 3, human being has used hitherto over 50% of metal resources on earth [3], such as silver, mercury, tin, zinc, lead, gold, manganese, cupper, etc, as shown in figure 2. However, fortunately, the consumption rate of iron, aluminum and other major metallic ores are below 30% or 20%. This paper discusses the relationship between metallic resources and the
CO2 problem, and the possible measurements which could restrict the emission of CO2 gas in the processing industries of metallic materials.
Figure 1. Change of CO2 gas concentration in atmosphere
Figure 2. Reserves and consumption rate of main metal
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