Metal Sustainability: Global Challenges, Consequences, and Prospects

The sustainable use of natural resources is an important global challenge, and improved metal sustainability is a crucial goal for the 21st century in order to conserve the supply of critical metals and mitigate the environmental and health issues resulting from unrecovered metals.

Metal Sustainability: Global Challenges, Consequences and Prospects discusses important topics and challenges associated with sustainability in metal life cycles, from mining ore to beneficiation processes, to product manufacture, to recovery from end-of-life materials, to environmental and health concerns resulting from generated waste. The broad perspective presented highlights the global interdependence of the many stages of metal life cycles. Economic issues are emphasized and relevant environmental, health, political, industrial and societal issues are discussed. The importance of applying green chemistry principles to metal sustainability is emphasized.

Topics covered include:
- Recycling and sustainable utilization of precious and specialty metals
- Formal and informal recycling from electronic and other high-tech wastes
- Global management of electronic wastes
- Metal reuse and recycling in developing countries
- Effects of toxic and other metal releases on the environment and human health
- Effect on bacteria of toxic metal release
- Selective recovery of platinum group metals and rare earth metals
- Metal sustainability from a manufacturing perspective
- Economic perspectives on sustainability, mineral development, and metal life cycles
- Closing the Loop - Minerals Industry Issues

The aim of this book is to improve awareness of the increasingly important role metals play in our high-tech society, the need to conserve our metal supply throughout the metal life cycle, the importance of improved metal recycling, and the effects that unhindered metal loss can have on the environment and on human health.

Dr. Reed M. Izatt, Charles E. Maw Professor of Chemistry (Emeritus), Brigham Young University, U.S.A.
Reed M. Izatt received a BS degree in Chemistry from Utah State University (1951) and a PhD degree in Chemistry with an Earth Sciences minor from Pennsylvania State University (1954). After post-doctoral work at Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, he embarked on an academic career at Brigham Young University retiring as Charles E. Maw Professor of Chemistry (1993). He is the
author or co-author of over 550 publications.
Research relevant to the subject matter of this book includes extensive studies of the coordination chemistry of metals; determination of trace metal concentration levels in human tissues and environmental samples; and development of novel liquid membrane and solid phase extraction systems capable of highly selective metal separations using molecular recognition principles. The separations work was recognized by the American Chemical Society in 1996 when Reed received the National Separation Science and Technology Award. In 1988, he co-founded IBC Advanced Technologies, Inc. (IBC). For 25 years, IBC has brought clean chemistry, highly selective metal separations to a variety of industries worldwide, including ore beneficiation and precious metal recycling.
Reed has edited several books, contributed numerous chapters in books, written many journal and review articles and presented plenary, invited, and regular lectures on the subject of selective metal separations at universities worldwide; regional, national, and international chemistry conferences; and government laboratories.