News item
25 Feb 10
Banks are also Customers
But in today’s scenario of a weak economy this is hardly likely. It certainly becomes clearer, that in the commodity markets, whoever is actively purchasing on a continual basis certainly has the upper hand. Unfortunately most of the managers and colleagues in purchasing departments have long understood this; only some at the head of companies still do not. Strategy advisors still wave the set rules of Working Capital at heads of companies. As much as this may be the right way to go in other branches, in commodity purchasing it is not often always advantageous to companies.
As so often in the past, under the term of urban mining, the ever increasing importance of, and awareness for, secondary commodities has been reported in political and media circles. A good example of this is a report which appeared recently in the “Handelsblatt” publication: “The topic of recycling gains more importance with the decline of natural resources. Experts talk about Urban Mining, and actually mean the just about inexhaustible commodity reservoir which can be found, in almost ready made form, within human conurbations.” Even scientists, like those from the renowned Yale University in the United States, have started to investigate just how many reserves of the industrial metals, copper, iron, zinc and aluminium, there are in cities. In Germany, on behalf of the Federal Environmental Ministry, similar data is being collected by researchers of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, as part of an all-embracing documentation. But this subject matter should not just be left to the environmental agencies alone, for, apart from the advantages to the ecosystem, the employment of recycled materials certainly has definite economic benefits for business.