Search USGS⌕ Search
Home/Archive/USGS

USGS · 70158916

Mining for metals in society's waste

Kathleen S. Smith·Geoffrey S. Plumlee·Philip L. Hageman
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Metals are crucial to society and enable our modern standard of living. Look around and you can't help but see products made of metals. For instance, a typical gasoline-powered automobile contains over a ton of iron and steel, 240 pounds of aluminum, 42 pounds of copper, 41 pounds of silicon, 22 pounds of zinc and more than 30 other mineral commodities including titanium, platinum and gold. Metals and minerals are natural resources that human beings have been mining for thousands of years. Contemporary metal mining is dominated by iron ore, copper and gold, with 2 billion tons of iron ore, nearly 20 million tons of copper and 2,000 tons of gold produced every year. Tens to hundreds of tons of other metals that are essential components for electronics, green energy production, and high-technology products are produced annually.

Explore related subjects

The ConversationArticle

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Kathleen S. Smith, Geoffrey S. Plumlee, Philip L. Hageman. 2015. Mining for metals in society's waste. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/70158916

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related USGS reports

USGS2017

Why were California's wine country fires so destructive?

As of late October more than a dozen wildfires north of San Francisco had killed more than 40 people, burned approximately 160,000 acres and destroyed more than 7,000 structures. This tragic loss of life and property is unprecedented in California. However, the fires are not anomalous events in terms of their size, intensity or the speed with which they spread. Indeed, the path of the destructive Tubbs fire in Napa and Sonoma counties mirrors that of the Hanley fire of 1964. This extreme wind-driven fire burned under similar conditions, across much of the same landscape and covered an area substantially greater than the recent Tubbs fire. Strikingly, though, no lives were lost during the Hanley fire and only 29 structures were destroyed. Why did these two fires, 50 years apart, burn on the same general landscape, under similar extreme winds, with such different human impacts? Fire scientists will study these events intensively to parse out the relative importance of various factors. But it is clear that two factors probably were major contributors: wind and population growth.

California↗