6.4.2 Urban mining for a circular economy

Course subject(s) Module 6. Thinking in Systems

How will urban mining benefit a circular economy? David Peck interviews dr Ester van der Voet. The video starts with Ester answering Dave’s question: “Why aren’t we currently mining our urban mines?”

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Subtitles (captions) in other languages than provided can be viewed at YouTube. Select your language in the CC-button of YouTube.

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Urban mining makes clever use of the materials that are already there. This reduces the need to extract new materials and reduces the amount of waste. Urban mining can be a valuable part of the Circular Economy.
  • Exploring the urban mine requires careful planning. We should for instance:
    • Develop new recycling technologies that enable us to retrieve metals from complex waste streams.
    • Design products in such a way that they can be taken apart easily, so we have cleaner waste streams.
    • Design materials in such a way that they can be recycled more easily.
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Circular Economy by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/circular-economy/.
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