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Smelting and Refining Department: DOWA Metals & Mining Co., Ltd./Aiming at being No.1 in East Asia with High Technology to Produce Key Materials

Business Description

DOWA Metals & Mining Co., Ltd., responsible for the core business of the DOWA group of smelting and refining, is deploying business steadily with its high technology in precious metal and copper, zinc and rare metal lines. We aim at being a top corporation in East Asia by continuously enhancing our business infrastructure through active investment.

Business Topics

Rare Metal by Urban Mining
- Melting Furnace Started Operation for Recycled Materials -

DOWA Metals and Mining, located in Kosaka, the birthplace of DOWA, is engaged as the core industry in the production of base metals including copper, lead and zinc, precious and rare metals that contribute to society as a whole. Leveraging our technologies long esteemed and developed in our history, we are now actively processing raw materials including electronic substrates from PCs and cell phones that are referred to as gurban miningh, in addition to imported ores. We contribute to resource-recycling society through production of recycled metals in response to the growing scarcity of natural resources.

Last year Kosaka Smelting and Refining started commercial operation of its new melting furnace for recycled materials. This new furnace processes a range of recycled materials, refractory materials, intermediate products produced by smelting, mineral concentrates containing high rate of gold and silver, contributing to effective recycling of valuable metals and reduction of wastes, and to further our resource-recycling society. In our life style, many electronic parts are used for PCs and cell phones and thus there are many valuable metals and rare metals found in used PCs and cell phones. We contribute to a resource-recycling society by aggressively collecting resources from such gurban miningh sources.

PhotoNew furnace at Kosaka Smelting and Refining

We also strengthened partnership with Akita Smelting and Refining and Kosaka Smelting and Refining, two largest zinc production bases in Japan to build the worldfs top smelting and refining complex to flexibly respond to recycling needs. We try to make use of other used products that used to be difficult to collect and process before. As such, we are committed to play a vital role in our resource-recycling society, by collecting rare metals from used products and supplying recycled materials back to society.

PhotoRecycled metal from Urban Mines

Photo

Generally, people might think that in Japanfs smelting and refining business, ores exploited from foreign mines are transported to Japan in a large ship and smelted and refined in Japan to produce metals. However, in Kosaka Smelting and Refining, we produce metals mainly from the recycled materials from urban mines. It is very important from the view point of conservation of the environment. In comparison with traditional ore refining, metal production from urban mines have benefits such as in ensuring a supply of rare metals, reducing the impact on the environment and reducing energy consumption throughout the entire lifecycle of products. We continue to contribute to building environmentally friendly society through smelting and refining by metal recycling.


President Nobuo Yamazaki

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