The minerals and metals industry wants the government to devise a new policy for urban mining, and insert a special provision in the extant rules regarding deep-seated minerals such as zinc, lead and copper.
Urban mining involves extracting metals, mainly non-ferrous varieties such as aluminium, copper, lead and zinc, from electronic and other wastes that urban areas predominantly generate. The potential in this area is seen to be big.
Hindalco’s managing director Satish Pai said: “We have to introduce in India a concept called urban mining. We sell around 4 million tonne of aluminium. Out of this, more than 60% is recycled aluminium.”
At an event organised by the ministry of mines recently, he said, “In fact, most of the big companies in the world today, including us, are investing heavily into recycling, which is the whole concept of urban mining.”
Pai, who has recently been appointed as the new chair of the International Aluminium Institute (IAI), the only global body for primary aluminium producers, said the government should increase urban mining through proper policy initiative. Hindalco is the second largest producer of primary aluminium in India.
Hindustan Zinc’s CEO Arun Misra said the deep-seated minerals, including gold and platinum, should have a special provision on the governing rules, because different facets of mining deep-seated minerals and bulk minerals such as iron ore and bauxite are different. Misra said that while a bulk mineral can be located, explored and extracted easily, the “deep-seated minerals are very difficult to locate, define and extremely difficult to mine”.
Typically, in a 100-hectare iron ore lease area, 90% of the area would be resource-bearing. But for deep-seated minerals, material can be found only in seven hectares of area and nothing in the rest. Even of the mined minerals, only a fraction can be used for metal production.
NMDC’s CMD Sumit Deb said some structural changes, such as the ‘one Bharat-one tariff’ policy for electricity and single-window clearances, are required in the country to give the sector the right impetus. Pankaj Satija, MD, Tata Steel Mining, said the country needs to rev up investment in exploration activities.