The recycling of global platinum group metals (PGMs) is a business that SA producers – which dominate the supply of the mined metals – will find difficult to enter, let alone control.

The recycling of PGMs mainly entails extracting platinum, palladium and rhodium from autocatalytic devices attached to the exhaust systems of petrol and diesel engines, and which scrub out pollutants and greenhouse gases.

According to data from Johnson Matthey, one of the largest makers of catalysts and a major PGM recycler, the reuse of these three metals from autocatalysts has grown to nearly 5 million ounces a year from about half that a decade earlier...