From industrial supply security to the new circular policy of 2025-2026, here is why Japan is accelerating urban mining of WEEE

Author: Marco Arezio. Expert in the circular economy, polymer recycling, and industrial processes for plastics. Founder of the rMIX platform, dedicated to enhancing the value of recycled materials and developing sustainable supply chains.

Date: March 26, 2026

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Urban mining of WEEE in Japan: an industrial strategy, not just an environmental one

When people talk about urban mining, they often think of an evocative, almost journalistic formula: digging in cities instead of mines. In Japan’s case, however, this expression has now lost its metaphorical character and describes a precise industrial choice. The country is now one of the world’s largest generators of electronic waste: according to the Global E-waste Monitor 2024, in 2022 Japan produced about 2.6 million tonnes of e-waste, equal to around 21 kg per capita, placing it among the leading countries in the world in terms of WEEE generation intensity. In the same year, the planet generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste, but only 22.3% was documented as properly collected and recycled; even more significant is the fact that only 1% of rare earth demand is currently met through WEEE recycling.

These figures explain why Japan has stopped treating WEEE as a simple disposal problem. For Tokyo, urban mining has become a component of national economic security. The government’s most recent energy and industrial documents state this very clearly: the country depends almost entirely on imports for mineral resources, and in the case of lithium, cobalt, and nickel, that dependence is indicated as 100%. At the same time, the 2025 Strategic Energy Plan emphasizes that copper, minor metals, and critical minerals are essential for batteries, motors, semiconductors, and more broadly for the digital and energy transition.

The point, therefore, is not merely to recover a few grams of gold from discarded smartphones. The point is to reduce the vulnerability of an advanced economy that relies on manufacturing, electronics, cars, batteries, components, and functional materials. The Japanese government openly acknowledges that uncertainty in supply chains has also grown because of export controls introduced in 2023 on products related to gallium, germanium, and graphite, and in 2024 on products related to antimony. In other words, recovering the metals contained in WEEE is no longer an ancillary waste management policy, but part of an industrial resilience strategy.

From the symbol of the Olympics to the reality of industrial flows

Japan had already shown the world the narrative potential of urban mining through the Tokyo 2020 medals project. About 5,000 medals for the Games were produced using metals extracted from mobile phones, small household appliances, and other devices collected throughout the country, with an overall recovery of 32 kg of gold, 3,500 kg of silver, and 2,200 kg of copper. It was a highly symbolic operation, but not only symbolic: it made visible to public opinion that electronic waste is a material reserve already present within the national territory.

Since then, however, the Japanese discourse has shifted from the educational level to the structural one. In the 2025 environmental report, the government links the circular economy not only to waste reduction, but also to the need to build systems capable of guaranteeing recycled materials with quality and quantities compatible with industry needs. The same document notes that at the end of 2024 the interministerial council on the circular economy developed a “Package for Accelerating the Transition to a Circular Economy,” while the Fifth Fundamental Plan for Establishing a Sound Material-Cycle Society, formulated in August 2024, was adopted as the national strategy for coordinating public action.

This is not a minor detail. As long as recycling remains separate from manufacturing, urban mining produces materials but does not always generate stable supply chains. When, on the other hand, the government pushes for integration between those who produce goods and those who handle waste, WEEE changes its economic nature: it stops being a cost to be managed and becomes industrial feedstock. This is the leap Japan is trying to make.

The most recent official data: collection still insufficient, metal value very high

This is where the most interesting paradox emerges. The most up-to-date official data available as of March 26, 2026 for the flow of small electronic devices in Japan are those for fiscal year 2023, published and discussed in ministerial forums during 2025. According to the Ministry of the Environment, in FY2023 the quantity of small household appliances and devices collected and delivered to recyclers was 86,410 tonnes, down by about 3% compared with the previous year and still far from the historical target of 140,000 tonnes per year. The recent peak had been surpassed in FY2020 with more than 102,000 tonnes; since then, the trend has weakened.

The causes identified by the government itself are instructive: stagnation in municipal collection, the proliferation of alternative channels outside the scope of the small electronics law, insufficient consumer awareness, and the gradual miniaturization of devices, which reduces the weight of the collected flows even when the number of units does not collapse. It is a very concrete diagnosis: the limit of Japanese urban mining today is not only metallurgical, but also logistical, organizational, and behavioral.

And yet, within those 86,410 tonnes there is a density of value that perfectly explains why Tokyo has no intention of slowing down. Still for FY2023, accredited recyclers obtained, after sorting and refining, 36,119 tonnes of iron, 3,827 tonnes of aluminum, 2,211 tonnes of copper, 322 kg of gold, 3,088 kg of silver, and 38 kg of palladium. Valuing these metals at the reference prices used by the ministry on June 1, 2024, gold alone was worth about 3.76 billion yen, equal to almost 40% of the total value of the metals considered; copper was worth about 2.43 billion yen, or more than a quarter of the total. Altogether, the seven metal groups listed in the table amounted to about 9.49 billion yen.

This is the core of the issue. Gold captures media attention, but the true economic significance of Japanese urban mining lies in the combination of precious metals with high value density and base or critical metals indispensable to advanced manufacturing. If one looks only at gold, one sees a brilliant story; if one looks at copper, palladium, nickel, cobalt, and minor metals, one sees the deep structure of Japanese industrial policy.

Why copper matters almost as much as gold

In a manufacturing country such as Japan, copper is not a “poor” metal compared with gold: it is a strategic metal. The 2025 Strategic Energy Plan explicitly places copper among the essential materials for storage batteries, motors, semiconductors, and other key products of the energy and digital transition. Another METI document from 2025 reiterates that, with the advance of GX and DX, the government is evaluating measures to strategically secure metallic bases and critical minerals, “such as copper resources,” needed for electrification and domestic industrial investment.

This explains why Japanese urban mining does not focus only on noble metals recoverable from high-tech circuit boards. The logic is broader: to build a domestic secondary supply base capable of integrating foreign mines, strategic stockpiles, national refining, and domestic recycling. In this architecture, copper is the bridge between the world of WEEE and the world of the large electrical and electronics industry. Gold brings margins; copper brings mass, continuity, and compatibility with large-scale supply chains.

How Japanese urban mining works on the industrial level

From a technical-industrial point of view, Japan is trying to strengthen what environmental documents define as coordination between “arterial” and “venous” industries: on one side manufacturing and distribution, on the other waste management, sorting, dismantling, treatment, and refining. The goal is to create a system capable of supplying recycled materials in the quality and quantity required by manufacturers. This is an important formulation, because it goes beyond the old idea of recycling as a residual activity and recognizes it as industrial infrastructure.

This approach is also taking concrete form on the ground. In the 2025 environmental report, the government cites the case of Kitakyushu as the largest Japanese Eco-Town, with 25 recycling companies active as of March 2025 and about 1,000 jobs created. The same district is presented as a place where recycling systems are being developed for photovoltaic panels, rechargeable car batteries, food resources, and other complex flows. In other words, urban mining is not conceived as an isolated sector, but as part of an industrial geography of the circular economy.

This territorial base is supported by highly developed advanced metallurgy. DOWA states that it can recycle up to 22 different metallic elements and, at its Kosaka site, produces almost 20 different valuable metals, including gold, silver, copper, indium, gallium, antimony, platinum, rhodium, and palladium.

The real acceleration of 2025-2026

The most relevant new development today is that Japan is not merely enhancing existing plants and expertise, but is trying to scale them up with new legislative tools and new investments. The Act Concerning Sophistication of Recycling Business, etc. to Promote Resource Circulation explicitly aims to promote decarbonization, supply security, and the availability of recycled resources in adequate quality and quantity, establishing a national authorization and certification system for raising the qualitative level of recycling.

In the government’s major 2024 economic action plan, it also states that, on the basis of this new act, it intends to certify more than 100 advanced resource circulation projects in three years. Even more telling is the quantitative target set for e-scrap: to bring the processing volume of electronic scrap recycling to about 500,000 tonnes by 2030, that is, a 50% increase compared with 2020, while supporting investment in plants and hubs. This step is perhaps the clearest signal that urban mining of WEEE is now regarded as a national industrial lever.

The year 2026 also shows signs of international acceleration. In the Japan-U.S. Joint Fact Sheet of March 20, 2026, METI notes Mitsubishi Materials’ interest in developing future rare earth recycling activity in Japan together with ReElement Technologies and recalls the Exurban project in the United States, centered on a secondary smelter that uses only scrap, such as end-of-life electronic boards, to produce copper, nickel, tin, gold, silver, and platinum group metals. A few days later, on March 24, 2026, ITOCHU announced with its subsidiary Belong the creation of ERI Japan, a joint venture with major U.S. operator ERI to develop IT equipment recycling in Japan; the same statement links the operation to the new legislative framework of November 2025 and to the expected growth of the IT asset disposition market.

The real limits of urban mining of WEEE

It would, however, be a mistake to present urban mining as the total solution to the issue of critical minerals. Global data themselves show that, despite the enormous potential value of WEEE, today only 1% of rare earth demand is met by e-waste recycling. This means that urban mining can become an important pillar of supply chains, but it does not entirely replace primary extraction. Its strength lies above all in reducing dependencies, recovering value already dispersed in consumption, lowering part of the environmental impacts of extraction, and offering a complementary domestic source of metals.

The Japanese government is also aware of another limitation: it is not enough to collect electronic waste, it must be collected selectively, traceably, and in a way compatible with industrial requirements. This is why it insists on broader separate collection, dismantling, shredding and sorting technologies, digital systems, AI, and cooperation between producers and recycling operators. The challenge is not only to “recycle more,” but to “recycle better,” so that secondary material can truly replace a growing share of virgin raw material in Japanese value chains.

Why Japan can set an example

The Japanese case is particularly interesting because it combines three dimensions that are often separate elsewhere. The first is a culture of recovery, made visible to the public also through the Olympic project. The second is the presence of a sophisticated metallurgical industry capable of recovering many elements through integrated processes of sorting, smelting, and refining. The third is the political choice to treat the circular economy as a matter of competitiveness, not only sustainability. It is no coincidence that METI estimates the “resource autonomous circular economy” market at 80 trillion yen in 2030 and 120 trillion yen in 2050.

For those observing the evolution of recycling in Europe or in Italy, Japan therefore offers an important lesson. Urban mining truly works when regulation, collection, plants, metallurgical technology, industrial demand, and public governance that regards recycled metal as a strategic material all exist together. If one of these links is missing, the system slows down. If, on the other hand, these links are coordinated, WEEE ceases to be waste and becomes an urban deposit of high-value resources.

Conclusions

Japan is accelerating urban mining of WEEE because it understood before others that the battle for the metals of the twenty-first century will not be fought only in traditional mines, but also inside cities, sorting plants, secondary smelters, and end-of-life electronics take-back chains. Gold, copper, palladium, and critical metals contained in electronic waste do not represent only an environmental opportunity: they represent industrial insurance against geopolitical volatility, a decarbonization factor, and a concrete foundation for manufacturing competitiveness.

For this reason, more than a chapter in waste management, Japanese urban mining should be read as a policy of material sovereignty. And the most recent data show that, despite still evident limits in collection, the country is already building the conditions to transform WEEE from an urban problem into a national strategic reserve.

FAQ

What does urban mining of WEEE mean?

It means recovering metals and other raw materials from waste electrical and electronic equipment, treating smartphones, computers, small household appliances, and electronic boards as a secondary source of resources. In the Japanese case, this activity is now part of a national strategy for the circular economy and supply security.

Why is Japan focusing especially on WEEE?

Because Japan generates large amounts of electronic waste, depends almost entirely on mineral imports, and considers copper, minor metals, and critical minerals essential for batteries, motors, and semiconductors. Urban mining therefore reduces both environmental pressure and the strategic vulnerability of industrial supply chains.

What are the most recent official data on small electronics in Japan?

The latest consolidated official data available as of March 26, 2026 are those for FY2023: 86,410 tonnes collected, with recoveries of 2,211 tonnes of copper, 322 kg of gold, 3,088 kg of silver, and 38 kg of palladium, in addition to large quantities of iron and aluminum.

Can urban mining completely replace traditional mining?

No. It can significantly supplement supplies and increase material security, but it does not completely replace primary extraction. At the global level, the Global E-waste Monitor 2024 notes that only 1% of rare earth demand is currently covered by WEEE recycling.

Which Japanese companies are leading urban mining?

Among the most important players are DOWA, which reports the recovery of 22 metallic elements, JX Advanced Metals, which produces copper refined above 99.99% also from recycled flows, and Mitsubishi Materials, which is aiming for 240,000 tonnes of annual e-scrap treatment capacity by 2030.

What is Japan’s target for e-scrap by 2030?

The government’s economic action plan indicates the goal of bringing the processing volume of e-scrap to about 500,000 tonnes by 2030, equal to a 50% increase compared with 2020, while supporting investment in advanced recycling plants and hubs.

Sources

Ministry of the Environment of Japan, Annual Report on the Environment in Japan 2025 and chapter on the circular economy.

Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan, Strategic Energy Plan 2025.

METI, documents on industrial policy 2024-2025 and the circular economy market.

Ministry of the Environment of Japan, 2025 documents on small electronics and metal recovery from WEEE.

METI and Ministry of the Environment of Japan, FY2023 results of the large home appliance recycling law.

E-Waste Monitor / UNITAR / ITU, Global E-waste Monitor 2024.

Government of Japan, Tokyo 2020 medals project from the “urban mine.”

Official texts and outline of the Japanese law on the sophistication of recycling and resource circulation.

Official corporate sources: DOWA, JX Advanced Metals, Mitsubishi Materials, ITOCHU.

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