Urban mining

Subject: Environment

Context:

With increasing e waste around the cities, urban mining gains importance.

Concept:

• Urban mining is the practice of extracting valuable metals and materials from electronic waste
• This makes it possible to obtain high quality steel from old washing machines. Precious metals such as gold, silver, platinum or palladium can be extracted from old mobile phones and computers.
• Urban mining has many advantages over primary mining: the materials are already in the city where they are likely to be needed again, so there is no need for long transport routes. And the environmental impact, particularly in land use, is clearly lower than mining for natural resources.