Abstract
THE dominant feature of industrial development in the nineteenth century was the use of power, but closely associated with it and of scarcely less importance was the enormous increase in the use of metals made possible by metallurgical progress. In 1800, for example, the world production of iron and steel was about half a million tons; in 1900 it was forty million tons, and now is more than three times as great. This rapid growth in the use of metals made serious inroads into the world reserves of ores, and in some countries the available resources, particularly of the richest ores, were exhausted or seriously depleted ; so that the problem of conservation has become urgent, and with this lies a close connexion with the question of the ultimate fate of metals in use and their recovery as scrap. To what extent are they lost in use? Do they, in fact, .follow man-made cycles like the well-known carbon and nitrogen cycles in Nature, so that the world stock is not in fact depleted?
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HARTLEY, H. RECOVERY OF METALS FROM SCRAP*. Nature 150, 594–597 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/150594a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/150594a0