Extracting gold from your mobile phone: Urban mining
Urban mining is a new approach to recycling, referring to the process of recovering metals from e-waste (Arya et al. 2021). This is a technique introduced recently to address the global e-waste challenge, as part of the push towards a more sustainable life cycle of electronic products. You could think of it as somewhat similar to the idea of renewable energy—it’s all about the recycling of what we already have, rather than generation from scratch.
Urban mining is an alternative to virgin mining, the more traditional method to extracting precious metals. Virgin mining is comparatively undesirable, having resulted in catastrophic environmental disasters in the past such as mine explosion events and poisoning events. Virgin mining has also been proven to be an unsustainable option for our future, according to Murthy & Ramakrishna (2021). On the other hand, urban mining is cheaper in cost and just as viable for extracting precious metals.
Olympic athletes show off small electronic devices donated by people from all over Japan, instead of their shiny medals (International Olympic Committee, 2021).
Have an extra old Nokia lying around that you don’t use anymore? It could be more valuable than you think. Between April 2017 and March 2019, people from all over Japan donated over six million mobile phones to the organisers of Tokyo 2020 (Smedley, 2020). From the devices collected, precious metals were extracted and used to make 5,000 gold, silver and bronze medals for the Games (International Olympic Committee, 2021).
It’s amazing how the Tokyo Olympics were able to garner so much support for their urban mining scheme. Locally, urban mining has yet to gain much traction in Singapore. Seeing the comparative advantages that urban mining offers over virgin mining, we should continue to explore how urban mining could be adopted and promoted outside large-scale events like the Olympics.
References
Arya, S., Patel, A., Kumar, S., & Pau-Loke, S. (2021). Urban mining of obsolete computers by manual dismantling and waste printed circuit boards by chemical leaching and toxicity assessment of its waste residues. Environmental Pollution (1987), 283, 117033-117033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2021.117033.
International Olympic Committee. (2021). Tokyo 2020 highlights the possibilities for a circular economy. Retrieved 5 April 2022, from https://olympics.com/ioc/news/tokyo-2020-highlights-the-possibilities-for-a-circular-economy.
Murthy, V., & Ramakrishna, S. (2022). A review on global E-waste management: Urban mining towards a sustainable future and circular economy. Sustainability (Basel, Switzerland), 14(2), 647. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14020647.
Smedley, T. (2020). How to mine precious metals in your home. Retrieved 1 April 2022, from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200407-urban-mining-how-your-home-may-be-a-gold-mine.