In the basements of cities lie invisible deposits. You don’t hear detonations or see shiny helmets, but there, in electronic waste, lies a promise that the circular economy is just beginning to decipher. Urban mining is not just an alternative: it is a new paradigm. Recovering critical metals from what we already use could change the geopolitical chessboard and the global dependence on natural resources.
“Electronic scrap is the new gold”
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
For decades, technological progress was fueled by a voracious cycle: extract, produce, consume and discard.
Since the 1970s, with the acceleration of planned obsolescence, the extraction of minerals such as lithium, cobalt, tin, tungsten and rare earths, essential for computers, telephones, electric cars and wind turbines, has intensified.
Africa, Latin America and Asia supported the digital and energy revolution of the Global North with their resources, while the mountains of electronic waste grew silently.
The circular economy, proposed as a response to the linear model of consumption, proposed in its beginnings to close the cycles of materials, but focused mainly on the most visible waste: plastics, cardboard, textiles.
Little was said about the valuable minerals trapped in e-waste. The idea of “urban mining”, that is, extracting these resources from disused devices, emerged at the end of the twentieth century, but its development was slow and dispersed.
Until geopolitics and natural exhaustion began to point in another direction.
“The 21st century will be metallic or it will not be”: a race for resources underground… And in the trash
The energy transition that pushes global powers to abandon fossil fuels has an underground material cost.
The World Bank estimates that, in order to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, the world will need 500% more strategic minerals in the next 30 years.
However, traditional mining comes up against environmental, social and economic limits.
The paradox is cruel: they seek to decarbonize the economy, but they do so at the expense of more mining.
In this context, the circular economy is beginning to look towards landfills, appliance dismantlers and technological waste deposits.
A report by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) revealed that, in 2022, the world generated 62 million tons of e-waste, of which only 22% was formally recycled. In that waste there was more than $90 billion in recoverable metals.
This is where urban mining is positioned as a hidden but potentially revolutionary axis of the circular economy.
It’s not just about avoiding polluting less, it’s about reimagining cities as modern mines, where waste is untapped veins of strategic resources.
Authors such as Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Walter R. Stahel have warned about the need to measure urban material flows more accurately, and to develop infrastructures that allow not only to collect, but also to refine, disassemble and reuse with high technological efficiency.
“The value hidden in what we do not see”: beyond recycling, an infrastructure of dismantling
Urban mining is not simple recycling. It involves a sophisticated process of identification, extraction and revaluation of metals contained in discarded products. While traditional recycling shreds, burns or melts, urban mining relies on the selective extraction of valuable materials, often at the microscopic level.
For example, a smartphone can contain up to 60 different elements, including gold, palladium, platinum, neodymium, tantalum, and rare earths. But accessing these metals requires specific technologies: non-polluting chemical processes, disassembly robotics and logistics models that collect end-of-life devices with surgical precision.
Most cities do not have this infrastructure. In addition, e-waste laws are often ineffective or outdated. Europe is timidly leading with the “Green Deal” and the WEEE directive, which obliges manufacturers to take responsibility for the collection and treatment of their products, but a systemic vision is still lacking.
Emerging economies, for their part, face the dilemma of informal collapse: huge landfills where motherboards are burned to extract copper and gold, with devastating health consequences, as is the case in Agbogbloshie (Ghana) or Guiyu (China). The real challenge is how to move from an invisible waste economy to a conscious and technological model of metal reuse.
“Mining without an excavator”: cities that extract resources without devastating mountains
Some initiatives are beginning to show the concrete potential of this underground circular economy. In Japan, more than 90% of the metals present in mobile phones are recovered thanks to a national automated collection and processing system. In fact, to manufacture the medals for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, the country extracted 30 kilos of gold, 4,100 kilos of silver and 2,700 kilos of bronze exclusively from electronic waste.
In Belgium, the Umicore innovation center converted a former foundry into a high-tech recycling plant, capable of recovering more than 20 different metals from electronic devices. Meanwhile, Singapore developed a traceability system that allows the journey of each device to be followed until its final disassembly, optimizing the extraction of minerals without significant environmental impacts.
In Latin America, however, cases are incipient. Chile, one of the largest copper exporters, is just beginning to explore urban mining in Santiago, while Colombia is pushing for an extended producer responsibility law, without yet reaching real technological capacity. Argentina, for its part, accumulates tons of electronic waste in municipal spaces without concrete plans for revaluation.
Beyond these initiatives, the key is to design products designed from the ground up to be disassembleable, with digital labels that indicate what minerals they contain, and with efficient reverse logistics. In other words, for urban mining to become a reality, the circular economy must cease to be a waste theory and become an industrial policy.
In conclusion, urban mining is one of the least explored but most urgent pillars of the circular economy.
In the face of the depletion of natural resources and the intensification of the energy transition, rescuing strategic metals from technological waste can be a game-changer.
It is not just a matter of recycling, but of radically rethinking the material metabolism of cities, making each technological waste a vein of the future
References:
- Fischer-Kowalski, M., & Haberl, H. (2007). Socioecological transitions and global change. Edward Elgar Publishing.
- Stahel, W. R. (2016). The Circular Economy: A User’s Guide. Routledge.
- UNITAR. (2023). Global E-Waste Monitor.
- World Bank. (2020). Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition.
