Mitsubishi Materials Corp., Mitsubishi Corp. and Furuya Metal Co., Ltd. (headquarters in Tokyo) will jointly develop a technology to recover and recycle platinum group metals from disposable catalyst and other waste.

They announced the conclusion of an agreement for the joint development on March 8, 2007.

The three companies project to first establish a recovery technology by combining Mitsubishi Materials' smelting technologies and Furuya Metal's processing technologies and then enter the recycling business early through Mitsubishi's noble metal marketing channel.

Platinum group metals including platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium and ruthenium boast superiority in heat resistance, corrosion resistance and catalytic activity.

Demand is strong from a wide range of fields for use as automobile emission gas and chemical engineering catalysts, as well as as materials for glass manufacturing furnaces, electronic components and magnetic memory devices.

The three companies expect the amount of platinum metal use to further increase for use in fuel cells and hard discs, among other applications.

They have also judged that demand for recycled platinum in order to secure stable supply amid current circumstances, where few materials and technologies can replace platinum group metals and resources locate only in South Africa and few other specific regions, will rapidly increase.