Materials and energy are at the heart of the Foundation’s preoccupations and message – in a world of finite resources where the overall long term trend is rising prices, and on which traditional industrial practices put a pressure it won’t withstand forever, finding a new model seems more than just a nice intellectual endeavour.
Part of that model involves a redesign of the materials themselves, since there is a pressing need for more non-toxic substances (biosphere) and for elements which can hold their level of quality regardless of the number of times they are reprocessed (technosphere). This forward-thinking aspect of the transition we deem necessary and feasible is a fascinating one, and to a certain extent its futuristic factor is extremely motivating for young people with creative minds.
Yet as we’ve often pointed out, relying on future developments and technology alone would be both over-optimistic and somewhat lazy, since it would mean avoiding to try and make better use of what we have. And if you consider that today’s situation is the culmination – some would say the cul-de-sac – of the industrial age, what we have on our hands is a world where a considerable amount of the extraction work has already been done: funny how we always look forward to future materials or worry about the implications of mining more stuff, but we never consider the wealth of resources already in circulation, isn’t it?
Lead mining on the upper Mississippi river – 1865
© Barber and Howe
Beyond dumpster diving
To keep this simple, imagine a young boy in his playroom, his mind set on building a spanking new house with Lego bricks, because his previous creation – still standing – does not satisfy the needs of the new generation of Lego people that just arrived in the region. To his left stands the previous dwelling, disused but made of carefully selected bricks, to his right a boxfull of muddled-up individual components (let’s consider that this selection process represents, by analogy, the raw materials transformation which happens in the ‘real world’). Where would you, in this little boy’s place, source your materials from? Chances are that in all his youthful enthusiasm and common sense, he will know that capitalising on the work he’s already done will save him time and effort. He will then have perfectly illustrated the concept of urban mining…
In a ‘slightly’ more elaborate way, urbanmining.org co-founder Jesse Stallone would describe this idea as “the process of reclaiming compounds and elements from products, building and waste (…) [It goes] beyond ‘Dumpster Diving’, [and] requires a systems approach that utilises industrial ecology when viewing our end-of-pipe activities for material recovery.” The expression is often used to describe the recovery process of precious metals from old electronic devices, and with roughly 30 times more gold in mobile phone circuitry than in ore as processed in mines on a tonne to tonne basis, the potential seems striking (1). But urban mining is not limited to delicate retrieval operations to salvage metals that are sought-after by jewellers, it also applies to large-scale materials pools we too often neglect.
Source: ELLEN MACARTHUR FOUNDATION
By Joss Blйriot