Urban Mining

The next decades, the demand for copper, lead, silver, nickel and gold will increase rapidly.

Parallel to this increase we see a fallback in the supply of these metals. Looking at Europe, we have hardly any metal mines and many abroad mines have deteriorated outputs.

But if I look at our community dump yards, if I look at abandoned buildings, if I look in my kitchen drawer with all the mobile phones I used over the last 15 years, if I look in my shed, see all these scrapped computers and hard drives, there are so many of these metals around us, but we don’t use them. Basically we are destroying it all, by burning it in large waste ovens.

I think that in 1 kg of old smartphones or computerscrap there is more gold and silver, compared to a kilogram of gold and silver ore.

Still I do not see that companies are starting activities on a large scale to “mine” these metals, what we call urban mining. We see some startups but all on a low scale and not profitable yet because it is economically not interesting at this moment.

We are of course recycling products, but that is not the same as urban mining.

I therefor think it should be wise to store these devices until we figured out a way how to mine these precious metals out of them in a profitable manner. Basically we create our own “mines” for the future.

Maybe you think this is all a bit far fetched and hippie-like, but if you think of this, why shouldn’t we start doing this. We actually could make this a sustainable process in the future by preserving our gold and silver reserves, we now store at our kitchen drawers, sheds and waste dumps.

Compared to my yesterdays post about offshore mining it is way more better for our environment.

Again some food for thoughts.

Enjoy.