MONTE CARLO (Reuters) - The future looks rosy for scrap metal traders as the world’s resources begin to run out and the threat of climate change triggers energy savings, a recycling conference heard this week.

A shop owner looks on at Medeber metal workshop and market where scrap metal is recycled and transformed into new objects in Asmara May 12, 2008. REUTERS/Radu Sigheti

With a rising global population -- forecast to reach 8.2 billion by 2030 from 6.7 billion now -- the generation of waste is increasing rapidly, offering big potential for recycling, which saves energy and helps reduce greenhouse gas production.

“The scarcity of virgin materials will soon become an issue,” Henrik Harjula of the Environment Directorate of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development told a Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) conference.

The world’s copper resources would last for another 60 years, silver 29 years, zinc 46 years while tin deposits would be exhausted in 40 years, he said.

Annual resource extraction would increase to 80 billion tonnes in 2020, nearly double the level extracted in 2002, and by 2030 it could reach 100 billion, according to the OECD.

“This poses a real opportunity, but it is also a challenge for the recycling industry,” OECD’s Harjula said.

In the production of copper, aluminum and steel, around 40 percent of the raw materials used comes from recycled metal instead of ore from mines.

CLIMATE CHANGE

By using secondary raw materials, smelters can make large cost savings, for example in aluminum where it takes 95 percent less energy to produce the metal from scrap such as old cans.

By smelting aluminum scrap, 354,000 tons of carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases, is saved per 100,000 tons of aluminum produced, a study by the Imperial College in London showed.

“The half a billion or more tons of greenhouse gas emissions that you avoid through recycling has a value of $40 or more per ton,” said Nicholas Stern, the author of an influential report on climate change.

The turnover of the recycling industry, including paper and plastics, per year amounts to around $160 billion and it handles over 600 million tons of raw materials.

Thanks to the recycling industry, the world already saves the equivalent of 1.8 percent of global fossil fuel emissions.

“This is a very significant contribution,” Stern said, adding that the recycling industry was saving a similar amount to what the airline industry emits.

By contributing an average of 40 percent of raw materials today through recycling, it could perhaps be 50 percent in the future.

“That will be equivalent to cutting aircraft emissions further by 15 percent,” Stern said.

However the recycling industry, in particular the steel industry, still has a long way to go to become energy efficient and reduce its own carbon footprint.

The steel industry accounts for a fifth of the emissions from the recycling sector and it emits some 3-4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Iron and Steel Institute (IISI).