The Renewability of Metal Resources – Recycling Opportunities and Limits

Primary resources nowadays show decreasing qualities regarding metal content and impurities. The alternative, to go for secondary raw materials like scraps and follow circular economy strategies, suffers from the often low availability of relevant scraps. In parallel the question, how limited Europe is in allowing new technologies to utilize possible metal resources, becomes important. In this context, a relatively new metal resource, by-products from metallurgical industry, have to be considered. Due to the long history of Europe in metal industry, huge amounts of such materials are available. Nevertheless, also in this case the question emerges, if Europe is able to cope with its limits to use this potential metal source in an appropriate way. The University of Leoben tries to realize an optimized use of various by-products combined with the development of a certification system, similar to procedures used in primary metallurgy to allow a better evaluation of by-products.