Tracking that many metals through their entire life cycle is a huge task, but the authors were able to build on previous work by Japanese researchers who developed a software model called MaTrace.

Figure 1: New design to track the flow of minerals.

Figure 1 shows that almost every aspect of modern society relies on materials of limited quantity on Earth. In order to live within the limits, set by our planet, we have to figure out how to make the most of what we extract and reuse whatever we have extracted.

A new study released this week looks into how close we are to reaching that ideal for 61 different metals. [1]

Along the way, its authors figure out how long different metals stay in circulation before they're lost and identify the stage at which those losses take place. While a lack of recycling is a major roadblock on the way to a circular economy, it's far from the only one.

For many metals, including some critically important ones, we discard huge amounts that are present in the ores that we mine for different elements. [2]

The mannequin is designed to trace the stream of supplies from manufacturing to loss, estimating losses at every stage of the fabric’s life cycle based mostly on empirical information.

Losses are tracked at a lot of factors in a fabric’s life cycle. For metals, these embody the manufacturing of an uncooked materials from ores, the steel’s use within the fabrication of merchandise, and its loss in the course of the product’s use.

Lastly, on the end-of-life stage of any product, the steel is both recycled or discarded as waste. MaTrace may monitor the stream of the fabric by way of the recycling course of (with its inevitable losses) and again into extra merchandise. [3]

To put this in concrete terms, we can turn to something simple like iron, which is mined from ores that are then processed. Both steps involve some loss of iron and any other metals that happen to be in the same ore.

The iron is eventually incorporated into products, a process that can again involve losses as extraneous material is cut away—some of the excess here is also sent into the recycling process. There's also loss during use, which can be as simple as a fraction of the iron rusting away into the environment. Ultimately, a fraction of the iron-based products will be recycled, with the remainder being discarded into the environment.[1]

References:

1. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/new-study-estimates-how-long-mined-metals-circulate-before-being-lost/
2. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/new-study-estimates-how-long-mined-metals-circulate-before-being-lost/? comments=1https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/new-study-estimates-how-long-mined-metals-circulate-before-being-lost/?comments=1
3. https://ilmiwap.com/new-study-estimates-how-long-mined-metals-circulate-before-being-lost/

Cite this article:

Sri Vasagi K (2022), Japanese Researchers Found New Design to Track the Flow of Materials, Anatechmaz, pp. 289