Recycling of a different kind ...

Excerpt from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Rivers of gold in our recycling bins

16 April 2007

The spectacle is apocalyptic, an end-of-life moment for the suburban dream. Cars, drain pipes, cans and refrigerators - recognisable in the maw of the machine - are spat out within two minutes as metal potatoes.

"They make handy paperweights," jokes Peter Netchaef, general manager of recycling at Sims Group, picking one among the millions. "We even catch and recycle the aluminium foil from chewing gun wrappers."

Sims Group, an Australian company and the world's biggest scrap metal recycler, last year had a turnover of $4 billion. It put almost 6 million tonnes of metal (about 100 times more steel than sits in the Harbour Bridge) to its shredders on three continents. It expects to do more this year.
The global scope of the recycling industry - including paper, plastic, glass and chemical - involves vastly wealthy and powerful companies in an industry that is expanding faster than anyone could have imagined.

"If you had said three or four years ago that we would be selling crushed plastic milk bottles for over $900 a tonne, no one would have believed it," said Geoff Gerard of WSN Environmental Solutions, the largest garbage recycler in NSW. Three years ago the price was $300 a tonne.

Waste is a new commodities stream, as abundant as a mine or an oil well. It has been aptly renamed urban ore by Global Renewables, an Australian company that has just won a $5 billion waste management contract with two British councils.

See - SMH - Rivers of gold.