ASSIGNMENT COURSE NAME : Introduction to Metallurgy & Materials COURSE CODE : MME 131 TOPIC : The Rise of Urban Mining : A Tremendous Process That Can Make The World A Better Place. SUBMITTED TO : Professor A.K.M. Bazlur Rashid, Department of Materials & Metallurgical Engineering,Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology SUBMITTED BY : Moupia Tajrin Oyshi ROLL : 1711048 DATE : 14/04/18 The Rise of Urban Mining : A Tremendous Process That Can Make The World A Better Place A Tremendous Process : Urban Mining The process that is going to be presented here hasn't just effected the civilisation lately, rather it's thought to be a fair medium for bringing a massive & outstanding change in the whole world history.
It's urban mining that is being talked about. Before discussing its necessities, the definition of “Urban Mining” should be mentioned. The process of reconstruction and reclamation of materials from urban mining, building and waste, which may not otherwise explode on land. By changing the way we see our waste related to our urban landscape, we are able to mine – collection and salvaging – recycled and recycled valuable components, tied to a zero-landfill path towards the future. (1) What We Think Is The End,Is Just The Beginning Nowadays,the biggest problem by which our planet is burdened with is e-waste.
The situation can be explained more precisely through some criteria. Smartphones are really common these days. Eventually, whenever our smartphones don't function properly like working slowly , we thoroughly decide to change the old one & get a brand new model. But the thing is , though we can easily forget all about our discarded device the moment we find a brand new shiny replacement in our hand, the mother planet can't just digest it overnight. And so the planet is getting burdened with these poor old things called junks or e-waste. Then we can come up with a bigger criteria which relates to industrial garbage.
To deal with the industrial trashes , the sector that pops up in our mind at first is the ship graveyard. To be mentioned, Bangladesh contains one of the largest ship graveyard. Hundreds of reports from national and international journalists & private organisations depict the miserable & pathetic condition of this area and most importantly the workers involved in it. For renewing those junk ships, poor workers are obliged to work with the hazardous garbage or scarp materials & metals by their almost bare hands without any proper safeties. As a result , the environment covering the ship graveyard is being dangerous day by day .
So the two criteria stated above deal with the necessity of urban mining in ensuring a better existence for both the mother planet and the human being itself. Then the eco-overhawk of the council's office, the lowest carbon peterprint of any recorded revision, is an example of so-called urban mining – the idea of reusing valuable materials instead of sending it to landfill. (2) The Surprising Findings Through The Surveys At first, the result of a survey conducted under the custody of UN should be mentioned here. According to the UN report 2017 Global E-waste Monitoring in 2016 alone, unauthorised or just unwanted electronics has dropped 44.7 million metric tons. There are 4,500 eiffel tower-priced phones, laptops, microbes and TVs. Only 20 percent of this e-waste could not be recycled properly that year.
The rebound could possibly be incinerated, pumping pollution in the atmosphere, or its toxic headaches now added to a landfill now with leakage in our soil and water supply. So the only trashing of our electronics is bad for the environment, but that is definitely not enough to prevent the practice. But what could be enough, the news that the cancelled electronics could be a literal gold mine. Of course, we already knew electronics that were precious metals besides glass and plastic, although the single smartphone is not so much that consumers buy 1.7 billion devices each year. Just one million people, we get about 75 pounds of gold, 35,000 pounds copper, and 772 pounds of silver. It's all added up.
But according to a press release from the American Chemical Society, depending on what was mining, it was not economically fit. To solve this problem, a triangle of researchers from Beijing University of Sinhahua and McKayry University in Sydney, which is now published in Environmental Science and Technology. First, the researchers collected information from eight recyclable companies in China. They count all the costs associated with the mining gold and copper from the recycled television set – from the payment of materials for the collection of e-waste materials and the buildings it needs to renew. After they figured out that, they could sell various components into government subsidies and funding companies company companies. Finally, researchers concluded that the total cost of this urban mining was compared to ore mining and that ore mining was 13 times more expensive.
Of course, not every nation has the same subsidies as China, and all costs of recycling will always be the same. But according to the United Nations report, China is the world's largest producer of e- waste. If the companies in that country see that they can earn money through e-waste mining, it can have a big impact on the overall problem. (3) Maybe more Chinese companies get the urban mining business.
Perhaps the companies of other countries want to start the practice. Or maybe we might think twice what to do with our smartphone once we get your hands on your replacement. So we can forget panning for gold or extracting copper ore whereas urban mining, is far less expensive than mining them the traditional way. So the most interesting and surprising finding is that, o ld electronics can be more profitable than the Lantal Gold Mine. The History of Mining & Its Significant Development to Urban Mining At this point of discussion, the process – urban mining must be expained in details. Human civilisation is familiar with the process since a very long time which is still undefined.But we can at least get a fair idea about how or by whom the process was modified and was brought to light with the term as urban mining.
At first , the history of mining & its influence on human civilisation should be talked about.Mining may well have been the second of humankind’s earliest endeavors— granted that agriculture was the first. The two industries ranked together as the primary or basic industries of early civilization. The history of mining is fascinating. It parallels the history of civilization, With many important cultural eras associated with and identified by various minerals or their derivatives: the Stone Age,the Bronze Age,the Iron Age,the Steel Age,and the Nuclear Age. As one of humanity’s earliest endeavors—and certainly one of its first organized industries—mining has an ancient and venerable history (Gregory, 1980). Conservation of mineral resources is an important issue.
Society is becoming much more cognizant of the need to conserve energy,minerals,and the environment and according to the environment, mining Industry has approved a policy that is favorable for more mineral sector Sustainable Methods (National Mining Association, 1998). (4) The term urban mining was derived from Professor Nanzhou of Tohoku University of Japan in 1980 and was provoked for recycling and reusing. In a nutshell, it is the process of recovery of components from compounds and products, buildings and waste. The transition from a linear to a circular approach illustrates waste management techniques over the last few decades. The linear traditional method is based on raw material, production, use, waste and landfill extraction. Urban Mining Vs Ore Mining As a result of global growth of economics and population, circular methods have been increasingly increasing from the increasing demand of basic raw materials.
The approach is going from the limited and specific stocks of raw materials to the growing anthropogenic stocks. It creates a foundation for urban mining development. Urban mineral operations work in the context of finalized work and technology finalization towards the replacement of second raw materials and energy from urban dwellers' products. As a result of urban mining for long-term environmental protection, asset conservation and economic benefits, a systemic management of Anthroponic Resource stocks (products and buildings) and losses are provided. An illustrative example given by Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE).
Due to their small eco-memory life, the amount of these waste streams is constantly increasing. Currently, their growth may be estimated as three times faster than the average growth of the municipal waste. Given that the gold density in electronic and electronic scraps is much higher than the amount of gold in the gold mine, due to recovering from WEEE, potentially resulting in more environmentally harmonious mining activity. To control the economic stability of the urban mining system and to focus more on product quality at production stage, the technical and economic liability increase should be transferred from the customer to the producer. Recycling and Minimization should be encouraged and promoted in the market related to stimulus, but adopt the most appropriate regulations and actions.
If the green technology continues pushing, creative solutions will be strengthened by challenging the world's rare metal envi-ronmental problems. Urban mining is one of them. As related to information technology, it is really where product lifecycle management meets the requirements for intelligent use of resources. Electronics folks often throw away an effective source of rare earth metals, and this electronics covers all the cities of the world. So, people are now using urban mining as a means of collecting electronic waste and re-claiming these rarefied electronics from rare earth metals.
There are about 500 grams of tons of 4 to 6 grams of circuit board per ton of ore. (5) Better Profibility of Urban Mining According to The Statistics In the Urban Mining of E-Waste is Becoming More Cost Effective Than Virgin Mining report , researchers : Xianlai Zeng and Jinhui Li of Tsinghua University in Beijing and John A Mathews of Macquarie University in Sydney wanted to determine whether it is an effective alternative to recycled e-waste mining. Researchers collected eight recycling companies in China to calculate the cost of copper and gold opening from e-waste. The cost includes waste collection, labor, energy, components and transportation costs, recycling equipment and capital costs for the home. Urban mining costs have declined to $ 1.684 per kg from $ 6.697 per kg in 2010, and $ 2012 per dollar from $ 8438 per kg in 2012, $ 1,191 per kg for gold in 2011 . By comparison, they cost about 0.8-0.9 dollars per kg (depending on the method of cut-off) and damaged by 1.4-1.6 dollars per kg, and $ 33,404.626 per kilogram for gold.
According to the United Nations Global E-waste Monitor report, by 2018, around 50 million tonnes of E-waste in the world will be abandoned. There are metals worth $ 50 billion in this waste stream. Analysing the report we can conclude that the cost is 13 times more (while obtaining these metals from ore) than from urban mining. As such, the researchers find implications for the economic prospects of urban mining as a circular economy alternative to virgin mining of ores . "Our results are confined to the cases of copper and gold extracted and processed from e-waste streams made up of recycled TV sets, but these results indicate a trend and potential if applied across a broader range of e-waste sources and metals extracted," the report reads.
"If these results can be extended to other metals and countries, they promise to have positive impact on waste disposal and mining activities globally, as the circular economy comes to displace linear economic pathways." (6) Impact of Under Mining in South Korea The report titled as ” Urban mining in South Korea pulls rare battery materials from recycled tech ” refers to the industrial evolution happened in South Korea by the blessings brought by urban mining. Workers in the rural South Korean factory are busy using most of the world's electricity, which use electricity electricity. But they do not dig in the ground or have a clean arc. Instead, they are sorted out of old mobile phones and laptops with a pill of lithium-ion batteries.
Increasing the price of China's aggressive Hunt for foreign cobalt and lithium and growing as a reason for South Korea's growing "urban mining" for the global shortage of metals, rising for the recovery of cobalt, lithium and other overwhelming metal from electronic waste. Sungel HiTech is South Korea's largest battery recycler. A decade ago, the company was on a crossroads like the Plessamo TV panel, from which it started to lift gold and silver. Now it is part of a supply chain for some of the world's big battery manufacturers including Samsung SDI (006400.sk) and LG Chem (051910.sk).
Ying Kong-Mung, president of SueLe Heutec, said that this year, the lack of mining metals has led to his company tripling power. It's planned to be listed in 2020. SungEl Hi-Tech, located in the southwestern city of Guanan, can process approximately 8,000 tonnes of tragedy lithium-ion batteries and metal scrap each year. From that, it can produce 830 tons of lithium phosphate, equivalent to 1000 tons of cobalt metal and 600 tons of nickel.
According to Sujela and Posco, POSCO (005490.AS) uses lithium phosphate to produce lithium carbonate for LG and Samsung's rechargeable battery manufacturers. The battery recycler plans to increase its processing capacity to 24,000 tonnes by 2019 and expand further in 2021, including growing its overseas operations, Yi said. T he company, however, is smaller than foreign competitors such as China’s Jiangxi Ganfeng Lithium ( 002460.SZ ) and GEM Co ( 002340.SZ ), and Belgium’s Umicore SA ( UMI.BR ). In the last three years, the amount of imported metal imported for South Korean Lithium-Ion batteries has increased, according to data from the State Institute of Korea of Geoscience and Mineral Resources. In 2010, South Korea imported 3.5 million tons of nickel, which increased by 2 percent from 2013. Cobalt import increased 3.4 percent to 13,972 tons a year ago.
CBDO stands at $ 87,615 tonnes in March on the increase of Cobalt prices four times since January 2016. This has led to more long-term supply contracts and investment in developing mining, and recycling efforts. Samsung SDI could start its own reusable business, a company spokesman said. Park Jai-koo, an urban mining expert at Hanyang University in Seoul, said electronic waste recycling can help mitigate high prices and limit reliance on outside sources for rare metals. ” South Korea needs to secure resources but mostly all of them are imported,” Park said. “Urban mining is more likely to become a way to go.” That was all about the jumping demand of urban mining.
Then the difference making perspective must be depicted here. According to the Korea Arma Mining Association, 150 small and medium-sized companies work in urban mining. At SungEl HiTech, the process is not complicated or extremely automated. Workers cut the pieces of the batteries from the recycled device, the units were discharged from the electricity, and then the soil was split into a powder from which separate metal can be separated. Most of the products that recycled – 60 to 70 percent – comes from the United States and Europe, with the rest from South Korea.
Recycling companies mainly focus on precious metal extraction like gold and silver. But four, including Sungel HiTech, can recover direct cobalt or find antibodies from the adverse substance. Yum Un-joo, chairman of the Korea Urban Mining Association, said recycled resources, if developed correctly, could be a difference maker for the industry and for his country. ” For South Korea, we don’t have an option but if we have recycled resources, that could be our strength,” Yum said. (7) Obstacles To Establish Urban Mining How much this El(ectronic)-Dorado might be worth, we can't yet tell. Getting robust data on the amount of precious metal used to manufacture electronics was the first challenge, says Ruediger Kuehr – a political scientist who thought about the issues involved in technology transfer and environmental policy over a decade ago, and who – as a result – co-founded the “Solving the E- Waste Problem” (StEP) initiative , a partnership between the United Nations and academic and business organisations.
This will not work as an effective policy solution for e-waste only, especially in the developing world, where the commands – at least not demanding public money – are unrealistic. To be self-sufficient and environmentally safe, e-waste recycling can be profitable; Where it can not be profitable, it was necessary to subsidise it. Some of these educators and government officials can not think in a commercial vacuum, let alone run.(8) Urban Mining: A Difference Making Process for The Mother Planet In conclusion to the whole discussion , Urban mining deals with not only Materials & Metallurgical Engineering, but also with Environmental Science,Economics,Electronic & Electrical Engineering and what not. Now the wind of change is blowing on & urban mining can lead us into the next age of green technology and scrutinise the effect that humanity is having in this pale Blue Dot.This was all about ” Urban Mining '' ; its tremendous impacts that have not just brought a positive change in human civilisation rather it's going to bring about a bigger affirmative change in the whole planet in the days to come.''What we think is the end,is just the beginning '' might be our slogan and thus we would be able to discover a world without any waste through the rise of urban mining. Reference : (1) http://chinookum.com/what-is-urban-mining/ (2) https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/oct/25/urban-mining-recyling-waste- buildings-offices-cities (3) https://futurism.com/urban-mining-old-electronics-profitable/ (4) https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/minings-contribution-civilization-nikhilesh-rodiwal/ (5) http://www.urbanminingsquared.com/urban-mining-vs-traditional-mining/ (6) https://www.insidewaste.com.au/general/news/1053394/-waste-mining-cost-effective-mining- virgin-materials (7) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-mining/urban-mining-in-south-korea-pulls-rare- battery-materials-from-recycled-tech-idUSKBN1HJ14T (8) https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorbutterworth/2012/07/17/welcome-to-the-age-of-urban- mining/#385b50c033d5
