Urban mining
By Stefan Schreiter
The economic crisis has for the time being put a stop to the rise in raw material prices, while the car-scrap bonus in Germany has led to bottlenecks at the scrap-yards, and sent the scrap price tumbling still further. The oil price, which had at times reached more than 100 dollars a barrel, is currently back to its 2005 level, at less than 50 dollars.
But these developments are temporary, not permanent. Before the crisis hit us, the costs for imported raw materials in the EU had risen by more than 80 per cent within a few short years. The prices for metals, in fact, had skyrocketed since 2006: the copper price had more than doubled, the steel price had climbed by over 50 per cent. Even scrap was getting expensive. Early in 2008, it was selling for just under 300 euros a ton, making it just as expensive as new steel was only a few years ago.
In the long term, prices for almost all raw materials will once again show a steep uptrend, thus upgrading the importance of recycling as well. Before the crisis, for example, the high oil price had substantially boosted trading in used plastics, which can replace new supplies in a production process. Nor will this state of affairs be altered any time soon by the use of bioplastics, meaning plastics made from renewable raw materials like maize or potatoes. At present, these still constitute a niche product, and their potential will remain limited for the foreseeable future.
The fact is: all around us, gigantic deposits of material resources are slumbering. Through global mass production of computers, vehicles, machines or buildings, we are distributing a multiplicity of different materials to the far corners of the nation. Most raw materials are limited in nature, and have to be laboriously extracted or produced. Until a few years ago, this was something we could afford. But since the economic upturn in the newly industrialising countries is driving up demand levels, and thus the prices for many resources, energy costs and raw material demand are becoming risk factors for economic growth. The ongoing crisis will entail only a temporary change in this situational matrix.
In Central Europe, purely mathematically, each inhabitant uses up about 40 kilograms of mineral resources and raw materials every day: sand and gravel, oil, gas and coal, but also wood, plastics and metals. It is to these natural resources that we owe our high standard of living. Everyday consumption, however, ensures that the deposits of natural raw materials are continually shrinking, while at the same time the amount of material actually there around us is exponentially increasing. Experts speak of growing “anthropogenic deposits”. The amount of copper accumulated by humans, warns the German government’s Council of Experts for Environmental Issues, is already greater today than the natural reserves still remaining worldwide.
Facts like these trigger some rather obvious questions. Why don’t we start thinking about the raw materials we’ve already paid for? Why don’t we use existing materials again and again and again? And can’t we do even more in order to effectively recover the large quantities of waste we produce? Experts have long since been using the term “urban mining”, a coinage encapsulating the fact that every densely populated city in an industrialised country is a gigantic mine of raw materials. Whether it’s buildings or equipment, vehicles or infrastructure, household waste or construction rubble – there are secondary raw materials to be found in all of these, which can be recycled, recovered and re-used.
In actual fact, this mine has already made a contribution: the industrial sector has for decades now been repeatedly transforming steel and aluminium scrap into new metal. Construction rubble is also used to create fresh material for other constructional purposes. And for more than 15 years in Germany, we have been recycling used packages made of glass, paper and plastics. Waste is quite generally a lucrative field for urban mining. Researchers at Vienna University are currently developing a concept to enable cities to use their residues from waste incineration more profitably in the future. The phosphorus present in the ashes, for instance, can be converted into fertiliser. And metals like copper, zinc or lead can be recovered from the slag.
Urban Mining has a whole lot going for it. For one thing, it saves money. The disposal and recovery companies already save the German economy approximately 5.3 billion euros’ worth of imports a year, a figure recently determined by the German Business Institute (IW) on behalf of the disposal sector. Secondly, it reduces the nation’s dependence on continuingly rising raw material prices and imports: thanks to waste recycling, according to the IW, the costs for metal raw materials have already been reduced by around 20 per cent and for energy imports by three per cent. In the vast majority of cases, significantly smaller quantities of energy are consumed when raw materials are recovered instead of being extracted from the natural environment.
In addition, Urban Mining reduces the environmental impact entailed by extracting and processing new raw materials. And not least, it’s good for the climate. On behalf of the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU), scientists have calculated that recycling various forms of waste has since 1990 saved more than 46 million tons of potential carbon dioxide emissions. This is about a quarter of what the whole of Germany has since this date saved in terms of greenhouse gases overall.
One particularly large anthropogenic storehouse in every city is the buildings. Construction work and residential structures swallow up an enormous amount of resources; a huge quantity of material is in “intermediate storage” here, so to speak. This summer has seen the introduction of the Energy Passport, which will reveal to tenants and buyers how much energy the apartment or house concerned actually consumes. This approach could be expanded: a resource passport could provide information on how much material has been used to construct a house or an apartment, on whether materials containing pollutants have been incorporated, plus on whether and how the construction materials involved can be recycled. This would boost awareness for the intrinsic value of resources not only among tenants and purchasers, but also among architects, planning engineers and construction companies.
We’ve only just started when it comes to utilising the gigantic storehouse of material we’ve piled up around us. Though politicians, it’s true, have begun to formulate strategies for efficient and intelligent husbanding of resources. The European Parliament, for example, has passed a new framework directive on waste, laying down that by 2020 at least 50 per cent of paper, metal and glass from household rubbish and similar waste flows, plus 70 per cent of non-hazardous construction and demolition waste, must be re-used or recycled throughout Europe. Where waste incidence cannot be avoided, the raw materials concerned are to be preserved for industrial use, and landfill dumping, still common practice in many European countries, is to be abolished entirely.
Resource-efficiency, however, demands innovative vigour from all the parties involved. The business community, not least the disposal sector, has to develop technologies that enable raw materials to be more effectively utilised and recovered. The universities should incorporate new content in their courses for designers and architects, encouraging their students to think about subsequent re-use when products and buildings are first being designed. Politicians have to foster awareness among consumers that long-lived products are not unfashionable, quite the contrary.
Urban Mining contributes towards preserving our own standard of living and driving forward the thrust towards a genuine closed-cycle economy. Intelligent husbanding of limited raw materials, however, will enable people in the world’s less developed regions as well to achieve sustainable, lasting improvements in their standard of living. Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm Wellmer, the long-serving President of the German Federal Agency for Geosciences and Raw Materials, has come up with a striking comparison: “We should treat resources like human talents. None must be abandoned, each must be fostered.” There is one salient difference between resources and human gifts, however: with talents, you never know how they’re going to develop. For most raw materials, by contrast, you can safely say there will be less of them tomorrow than today.
Stefan Schreiter (44) is CEO of Der Grüne Punkt – Duales System Deutschland GmbH, Cologne, Germany
Urban mining means seeing “cities as a source of raw materials” and subsumes all activities designed to selectively recover material from the urban infrastructure. This includes both recycling packages and re-using components, or utilising scrap in steel production processes. A promising future is being predicted for the concept of urban mining: more and more, waste is regarded by the disposal industry not only in terms of how to get rid of it, but primarily in terms of its amenability to being recycled into (secondary) raw materials.
