Department Management Systems, College of Informatics and Human Communication,

Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Ishikawa, Japan.
*Correspondence: j-osawa@neptune.kanazawa-it.ac.jp

Abstract
Japan and many other countries worldwide are moving toward carbon neutrality. Hence, CO₂ reduction has become an important issue for the transportation sector. Clean energy vehicles (CEVs), which emit less CO₂, are being introduced, but CEVs consume more rare metals such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel than do gasoline vehicles, owing to their batteries and other components. Moreover, rare metals face risks regarding the supply of primary resources. Therefore, forecasting and analyzing the supply of secondary resources from rare metal recycling is necessary for the introduction of CEVs in Japan. In this study, the number of scrapped passenger vehicles was estimated using the Weibull distribution, and the amount of recyclable rare metals was evaluated. The results show that the amount of recyclable rare metals is expected to increase significantly by approximately 2,600 tons in 2030 compared with 2021 as the number of scrapped CEVs increases in the improvement of the recycling rate scenario. However, demand will also increase significantly; therefore, arterial and venous automotive industries must further collaborate to increase the amount of recycling and maximize its utilization.

Keywords
Automotive industry, circular economy, rare metal, recycling

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