The Romans, like the Phoenicians before them, also mined copper from the rich deposits at Río Tinto in Spain. But they recycled too: They melted down bronze statues from conquered peoples to make weapons. Copper has always been a prime target for recyclers. Compared with sewage, it's scarce and valuable.
古羅馬人和更早期的腓尼基人一樣，在西班牙里奧廷托的富饒礦藏中開采銅。但他們也會回收。他們熔化被征服者的銅像，鑄造武器。銅一向是回收者的主要目標。和糞尿相比，它更稀有，更貴重。
In the yard at the Aurubis copper smelter in Lünen, in the Ruhr region of western Germany, a large bust of Lenin stands in a flower bed -- a souvenir of the many bronze Lenins melted here, from towns around communist East Germany, after East and West were reunited in 1990. Aurubis, Europe's largest copper producer, is also the world's largest copper recycler. When the Lünen plant was built in 1916, at the height of World War I, copper for artillery shells was in short supply, and Germans were pulling bronze bells out of church towers. "Since that day, this plant has exclusively done recycling," said Detlev Laser, the deputy plant manager.
在德國西部魯爾區呂嫩市的奧如比斯煉銅廠的庭院里，一座巨大的列寧半身像聳立在花床之中，是在這里燒熔的諸多列寧像的余緒。當初它們來自1990年兩德統一后的社會主義東德各城鎮。奧如比斯是歐洲最大的精煉銅生廠商，也是世界最大的銅回收者。呂嫩的工廠在1916年一次世界大戰高峰期間建起，當時銅制炮彈殼短缺，德國人因此從各個教堂的鐘樓里卸出銅鐘應急。“從那天起，這家工廠專做回收材料。”經理代理德特勒夫·拉澤說。
Copper, unlike plastic, say, can be recycled indefinitely without loss of quality -- it's a perfect circular material. The Lünen plant still processes bulk copper, mostly pipes and cables, but it has had to adapt to waste with much lower concentrations. As Europe has replaced landfills with municipal incinerators, a lot of slag is showing up containing bits of metal -- "because someone threw their cell phone in the trash" instead of the recycling bin, Laser said.
銅與塑料不同，可以無限反復回收而不損質量，是完美循環材料。呂嫩的工廠仍然回收批量廢銅，大部分是管道和纜線，但也不得不適應處理含銅量度較低的廢料。在歐洲以市立焚化爐取代垃圾填埋場后，出現了許多僅含只銅片鐵的廢物--拉澤說，“因為有人把手機丟到垃圾桶里了”，而不是投入回收箱。
With Hendrik Roth, the plant's environmental manager, I watched an excavator drop bucketloads of electronic debris, including laptops, onto a sloping conveyor that carried it toward a shredder -- the first of more than a dozen steps in the bewildering and deafening sorting process. At one station, a conveyor raced by, carrying hand-size shards of circuit boards. Some fell into an abyss; others leaped as if by their own volition onto a belt above. A camera system, Roth explained, was deciding whether each shard contained metal -- and if not, activating an air jet under it at just the right instant.
我和環境經理亨德里克·羅特一起觀看挖掘機拋下一桶一桶的電子殘骸，包括筆記本電腦，投到傾斜的傳送帶上，送向粉碎機--這只是十幾個紛亂嘈雜的分類過程中的第一步。在其中一站，一條傳送帶載著手掌大小的電路板飛速流過。其中一些落入深淵；其余的則好像活了一般跳上另一條傳送帶。羅特解釋說，一套攝像系統判斷各個電路板中是否存在金屬--如果沒有，則啟動噴氣吹走它。
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