Urban mining: revitalized recycling that goes beyond electronics

Remember when recycling, re-using, re-conditioning, refurbishing, and revitalizing were the
environmental buzzwords?  It started a long time ago when families were recycling vegetable scraps to feed their chickens or to make a compost pile to renurture the soil. Then soft drink and beer bottles were recycled, and then cans. Government offices and businesses installed boxes to recycle paper.

Now urban mining is the introduced concept to handle recycling in a rapidly changing technological age. Urban mining generally refers to the resources in cities that can be recycled and reused. It includes virtually everything, but most often refers to small electrical and electronic items, such as phones, laptops, i-pads, and the like. It can also refer to large structures, such as buildings.  

Where old computers and electronics were gathered in cities and shipped to developing countries to be used by communities – thus recycling the items – they are more likely now to be collected for separation and re-use within the city they originated from. Sorting outdated and abandoned technological equipment so that the valuable metals and materials can be recycled is becoming more popular. This type of mining reduces costs in the city of origin and saves on transportation costs to ship them elsewhere. The extraction of metals and chemicals for clean use has long term positive impacts on the environment, but it is still in its infancy.

Mining equates to exploration and extraction, as well as prospecting for worthy and useful minerals. Urban mining is exactly that, as well as recycling, but it is also much more. Companies are being urged to think about the life of a product, and its reuse or multiple use, at the design stage. Can the product be broken down safely into individual substances? Is it sustainable?

And it applies to chemicals and by-products and waste, and not merely to the hard shell of a product, or its metals (such as gold, copper etc.). Urban water – kitchen and bathroom and cooking water – can be “mined” or recycled for further use. So can steam, and gas, and chemicals, and waste (just like worm castings can be reused in the garden, manufacturing and production waste can be considered for reuse). All forms of energy are also being included into the concept of urban mining. Everything from bones to feathers, from paper to plastic, from metals to manure, from eggshells to human hair, can all be considered as part of urban mining. So urban mining is more than electronic recycling, it encompasses a holistic approach to sustainable living.

http://urban-mining.com

http://urbanmining.org