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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Collector1966, post: 1716335, member: 17919&quot;]I don&#039;t see how you can possibly equate &quot;asteroid mining&quot;, sending spaceships to asteroids millions of miles away and then trying to bring them back to Earth filled with usable minerals, with a viable technology that has recently been developed and for which the infrastructure is already in place. </p><p><br /></p><p>I live in Japan. I have close ties with the Japanese mining industry. Once a week a truck comes around the neighborhood to collect junk computers and electronic devices, and the Japanese government has made it official policy to promote the recycling of junk electronics to recover their usable metals. And many companies in Japan are already in the business of recovering precious metals from electronic scrap, as noted, for example, in this English-language article written by a senior researcher at the Metal Economics Research Institute of Japan:</p><p><br /></p><p><b><span style="color: black"><font face="Verdana">&quot;At the same time, efforts are being made to improve recycling technologies to recover precious and rare metals from discarded home appliances, electronics, mobile telephones and automobiles.</font></span></b></p><p><b><span style="color: black"><font face="Verdana"><br /></font></span></b></p><p><b><span style="color: black"><font face="Verdana">Businesses are already established to recover gold, silver and platinum-group metals, and Japan is investing in recycling projects in Southeast Asia, China and elsewhere. It is highly likely the number of metals targeted for recovery will increase as recovery technology advances.</font></span></b></p><p><b><span style="color: black"><font face="Verdana"><br /></font></span></b></p><p><b><span style="color: black"><font face="Verdana">By viewing metals contained in discarded products as reserves, these products are beginning to be treated as &quot;urban mines&quot;.</font></span></b></p><p><b><span style="color: black"><font face="Verdana"><br /></font></span></b></p><p><b><span style="color: black"><font face="Verdana">These are important resources for Japan and other countries, which are dependent on foreign supplies. For Japan, as a technically advanced country, major topics for the future will be how to economically extract useable metals such as rare earths, tantalum, cobalt, tungsten and gallium from urban mines, and whether or not they can be supplied to processing industries as raw materials.&quot;</font></span></b></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><a href="http://www.kwrintl.com/library/2011/japansnewstrategy.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.kwrintl.com/library/2011/japansnewstrategy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kwrintl.com/library/2011/japansnewstrategy.html</a>[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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