Urban Mining of E-Waste: A Sustainable Alternative to Geological Mining

The awareness regarding e-waste and its consequences is something that has only been recently kindled in the public consciousness. The long overdue conversations regarding the environmental and human impacts of e-waste are finally happening. However, one aspect of e-waste that is relatively less well-known is the idea of 'urban mining.' But, before we get into the notion of urban mining, it's important to understand the repercussions of geological mining, often known as traditional mining.

The Environmental & Human Consequences of Geological Mining

Geological mining is an inherently invasive process that frequently causes significant environmental and human damage. The effects can result in erosion, sinkholes, loss of biodiversity, or the contamination of soil, groundwater, and freshwater resources by chemicals released during mining operations. Given its reliance on fossil fuels to operate mines, the mining industry has a relatively high carbon footprint. Furthermore, modern mining technology necessitates extensive water use, which can strain water supplies in water-stressed areas.

Mining can also negatively impact local communities by displacing them from their homes and land, denying them access to clean land and water, harming their health and livelihoods, and exposing them to harassment from mine or government security.

Countries like Congo have been riddled with conflicts being fought to control the mines where valuable materials are extracted.

What is Urban Mining?

The presence of the word ‘waste’ in the term ‘e-waste’ may give the impression that it is nothing but garbage but the truth is that e-waste often contains a range of precious metals that have value such as gold, silver, palladium, tin, and copper.

Urban mining is the process of recovering raw materials such as metals and minerals from e-waste largely found in cities. Urban mining considers the waste generated by cities and urban environments as a valuable resource moving from geological stocks to anthropogenic to meet the demands of manufacturing.

Today, urban mining is seen as a viable resource for materials that are either hard or expensive to extract and a solution to resource preservation and energy conservation.

According to a report, the annual value of global e-waste is over $62.5 billion, more than most countries’ GDP. To put into perspective, as much as 7% of the world's gold may currently be contained in e-waste, with 100 times more gold in a tonne of e-waste than in a tonne of gold ore and 6.5 times more silver than a tonne of silver ore.

While it’s always better to avoid creating e-waste in the first place, today’s tech-oriented world makes some degree of waste unavoidable.

Advantages of Urban Mining

Urban mining has environmental, economic, and humanitarian benefits:

• Reducing the negative environmental effects of traditional mining – Given its emphasis on recycling, which has a lower environmental footprint than mining for primary materials, urban mining maintains a smaller environmental cost than geological mining. The need for future developments in mining techniques, such as deep-sea mining, which are likely to have negative environmental effects, may also be eliminated by the more widespread use of urban mining.
• Establishing a circular economy – The circular economy refers to the process of reintegrating products into the economy in order to reduce waste and extend the life of finite resources. Through recycling or recovery from landfills, urban mining can assist in reintroducing the raw materials of these abandoned commodities back into the market. This cycle of gathering and reusing waste products has the potential to lead to more sustainable raw material use.
• Cost-efficient – According to a recent study, urban mining of some e-waste is becoming as cost-effective as traditional mining in China. The study discovered that copper and gold blocks may be recovered from Chinese e-waste processors at comparable costs to traditional copper and gold ore mining. Similar research revealed that recovering aluminium from end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) is more cost-effective than doing so using conventional mining techniques.
• Earth’s reserves being exhausted – Earth's resource supplies are gradually but inevitably being depleted. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation asserts that the era of low-cost, simple-to-extract raw materials is passing. Additionally, the extraction of any remaining sources of raw materials is becoming increasingly challenging. In this situation, urban mining might be a viable alternative.
• Making rare metals available again - Another advantage of urban mining is that it makes highly rare earth metals like europium and terbium available once again. These precious minerals are mined mostly in China and exported only in modest amounts.
• Addressing supply chain issues – Urban mining can also shorten supply chains and reduce travel times by bringing geographically-scarce resources closer to the point of use.

Challenges

• Lack of technical capacity in developing countries— Urban mining faces many difficulties, not the least of which is a lack of advanced equipment and technical expertise, particularly in developing nations. For instance, a study on urban mining in Sri Lanka revealed that the country lacked advanced processing facilities for efficient e-waste disassembly. Often, along with gold and copper, e-waste frequently includes a variety of much more hazardous materials, such as lead, beryllium, and mercury, that the informal "miners" must sort through.
• Lack of financial incentives – For prospective entrepreneurs and investors wishing to enter the market, the absence of advanced technology and technical know-how in developing countries has made the e-waste recycling industry financially unattractive Recovering rare earth minerals from magnets necessitates either extensive manual labour or specialized technology.  Businesses without access to adequate technology are likely to incur significant labour costs and rely on crude disassembly procedures that do not recover huge amounts of valuable materials. As a result of this dynamic, costs rise while output falls, making any possible enterprise financially unstable.

Government’s Role in Enabling Urban Mining

Governments can enact clear and stringent policies that encourage e-waste recycling over landfilling. It may also explore legislation requiring recycling essential metals found in e-waste, such as lithium, neodymium, and praseodymium. Since different approaches to product design, labelling, and standards hinder material and product movements between nations, it is imperative that environmental regulations be uniform across borders.

Governments can support programmes to acquire technical skills, as well as provide the necessary infrastructure, and incentives for the creation of and access to e-waste recycling technology. Governments can support e-waste technology development through tax incentives and other benefits and encourage e-waste management research and development.

Several e-waste technologies are currently being developed, including those that can help with the recycling of particular compounds found in e-waste. Providing access to these technologies to both developed and developing countries will be critical to boosting urban mining. Furthermore, governments should invest in vocational training for jobs in the e-waste recycling business. As developing and managing advanced e-waste management technologies and systems will become increasingly challenging without technological know-how.