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.
古罗马人和更早期的腓尼基人一样，在西班牙里奥廷托的富饶矿藏中开采铜。但他们也会回收。他们熔化被征服者的铜像，铸造武器。铜一向是回收者的主要目标。和粪尿相比，它更稀有，更贵重。
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.
在德国西部鲁尔区吕嫩市的奥如比斯炼铜厂的庭院里，一座巨大的列宁半身像耸立在花床之中，是在这里烧熔的诸多列宁像的余绪。当初它们来自1990年两德统一后的社会主义东德各城镇。奥如比斯是欧洲最大的精炼铜生厂商，也是世界最大的铜回收者。吕嫩的工厂在1916年一次世界大战高峰期间建起，当时铜制炮弹壳短缺，德国人因此从各个教堂的钟楼里卸出铜钟应急。“从那天起，这家工厂专做回收材料。”经理代理德特勒夫·拉泽说。
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.
铜与塑料不同，可以无限反复回收而不损质量，是完美循环材料。吕嫩的工厂仍然回收批量废铜，大部分是管道和缆线，但也不得不适应处理含铜量度较低的废料。在欧洲以市立焚化炉取代垃圾填埋场后，出现了许多仅含只铜片铁的废物--拉泽说，“因为有人把手机丢到垃圾桶里了”，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.
我和环境经理亨德里克·罗特一起观看挖掘机抛下一桶一桶的电子残骸，包括笔记本电脑，投到倾斜的传送带上，送向粉碎机--这只是十几个纷乱嘈杂的分类过程中的第一步。在其中一站，一条传送带载着手掌大小的电路板飞速流过。其中一些落入深渊；其余的则好像活了一般跳上另一条传送带。罗特解释说，一套摄像系统判断各个电路板中是否存在金属--如果没有，则启动喷气吹走它。
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