How Urban Mining is set to revolutionise everything.

Most of us are familiar with the adage: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The idea is that entrenching these habits can help create circular economies. Reducing volumes of virgin resources being extracted from the earth and reducing carbon emissions.

The current problem is not a lack of will or even the technology needed to create circular economies, it is the ability to scale these efforts. There are significantly more resources in the economy than are currently being extracted. True, the capacity for recycling is being expanded, but so too is global consumption. At the moment, while progress is being made, we’re not close to keeping up.

In the meantime virgin resources are still being extracted from the earth and carbon emissions continue to rise. Those are the trajectories that need to change and urban mining may well be a key part of the solution. With resource extraction rates proving to be significantly higher than from virgin resources, urban mining is indeed attracting a lot of attention and investment.

Where do the biggest opportunities in Urban Mining exist?

As raw materials become rare and costs to extract and process them continue to rise, industries are starting to look for alternative sources. Urban mining is starting to be part of the solution and there are very few industries where it can’t be applied. A good starting point is considering the industries responsible for some of the largest volumes of carbon emissions and waste.

The construction industry contributes more than 40% of global carbon emissions and generates a significant amount of waste. This in part is due to the vast amounts of concrete and steel used for building. Both of these materials carry high carbon emissions. Fortunately they’re also easy to recycle.

As large office spaces become redundant and buildings are set for demolition, a new approach to recycling is emerging with a focus on reducing carbon emissions. Rather than collecting steel and sending it to the smelters, engineers are looking for ways to reuse it in its current form. This dramatically reduces the carbon footprint. The same applies to glass and wood.

A key challenge is that the traditional approach to building is to permanently bond materials together. This makes disassembly and sorting of materials more difficult. Modular construction methods are now being encouraged using bolts and similar methods to join building elements.  Engineers and architects are being encouraged to design and specify materials in a way that they can be reused, not just recycled at some point in the future.

With a renewed focus on making buildings more energy efficient there are many ways to repurpose materials within the construction industry. Urban mining in construction is finding innovative ways to do this and in the process aims to greatly reduce carbon emissions in the built environment.  

 

Global e-waste volumes currently exceed 50 million metric tonnes. With the way that technology is constantly upgrading and making devices obsolete, this is likely to increase in future. Instead of shipping e-waste abroad there are opportunities to develop urban mining facilities locally to support this growing sector.

Precious metals contained in electronic devices include:  gold, palladium, copper and silver. Not to mention the lithium that powers the batteries in almost all electronic devices. Research shows that urban mining can extract approximately 150g of gold from 1 ton of e-waste. This may not seem like much except when compared to how much gold is extracted from traditional ore mining operations - 1 ton of gold ore produces only 5g of gold.

With 53 million metric tonnes of global e-waste, the world is quite literally sitting on a goldmine. These statistics illustrate why urban mining is set to become big business. With more than 30 times the yield from urban mining activities it makes economic sense to actively develop urban mining facilities.

But recycling e-waste is not a simple process. Aside from precious metals, electronic devices can contain as many as 69 different materials, many of them hazardous. Ensuring they can be safely processed or recycled requires specific expertise –much of which exists in the waste management sector.

This highlights the opportunity for professionals in the waste management sector to contribute to creating circular solutions across industries. The knowledge of what’s possible and what’s needed to make it work can help shape strategies, develop operational models and influence decision making. By looking at the end game and understanding what it’ll take to get there can help revolutionise how industries source materials, manufacture products and help connect all the dots to generate circular economies in the future.