Only the U.S. government could come up with a weird name like sequester for budget cuts. The U.S. EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has one of its own oddball terms related to discarded electronics, referring to that problem as “end of life management.”
Except that is not the end of life for electronics today. Enter another term that John S. Shegerian, the co-founder and CEO of Electronics Recyclers International, Inc. (ERI), claims as his invention: urban mining. Founded in 2002, the California-based company now also claims to be the “undisputed number one urban mining brand in the world,” processing over 160 million pounds annually in plants across the U.S.
What is Urban Mining?
In the simplest terms, urban mining is recycling. The broad definition is the reclaiming of compounds and elements from products, buildings — like a gold rush happening in American landfills!
More specifically in this context, urban mining means extracting the valuable minerals from electronics, especially rare earths. Molycorp is the only U.S. rare earth mining company. China rules the market as the exporter of over ninety percent of rare earths and has curbed the sale of these precious commodities that are so essential in electronic manufacturing.
Source: Yahoo Voices