Mitsui Mining & Smelting to Launch Precious Metal Recycling in Shanghai

Mitsui Mining & Smelting announced on Tuesday the firm will establish precious metal recycling joint venture with local recycler in April in Shanghai. The firm invests US$ 2.8 million and controls 80% of the JV with US$ 3.5 million of capital. The firm will build the plant for 390 million yen starting the operation at annual 5,000 tonnes of treatment capacity in January 2007. Mitsui Mining & Smelting and the Chinese partner build the plant in the partners’ land. The partner is major nonferrous metal recycler in Shanghai to produce secondary lead, alloyed lead and secondary silver. They build plant with 1,554 square meters of floor space on 5,070 square meters of land. The plant has dry process to recover valuable metals by melting scrap materials with high temperature and wet process to recover metals through chemical reaction melting and electrolysis. The plant generates scraps including waste electric substrate with gold, silver and other precious metals in China. The plant will recover the metals after separation and scrapping of materials. The plant will sell the metals as intermediate materials for unrefined gold and silver. Waste electric materials including precious metals increase in China when the country grows in output and consumption as world base of manufactures and the mega market. The precious metal generation is expected to increase at least for 5 years and the generation is estimated to be 30,000-40,000 tonnes only in Shanghai in 2007.