Our city's greatest resources aren't buried underground.
They're hiding in plain sight within the very waste that we discard every day.
Today we'll journey into the unseen world of urban mining to discover how tomorrow's essential materials are being reclaimed from yesterday's forgotten trash.
Coming to you live from Beijing, this is Roundtable.
I'm Steve.
Thank you so much for sharing your time.
And for the show today, I'm with Feifei and Yushan.
First up cities are brimming with hidden treasures, often concealed within construction debris, scrap metal and discarded electronics.
Urban mining seeks to unlock this potential by recovering valuable materials, thereby reducing landfill pressure and creating a circular economy where yesterday's waste becomes tomorrow's resource.
To tap into these reserves efficiently, cities must implement intelligent sorting systems and also foster partnerships between municipalities, waste managers and manufacturers.
It's not an easy job to do but one worth doing.
Successful scaling ultimately depends on both innovative technology and economic incentives that make material recovery more profitable than traditional extraction.
Fei-Fei and Yisheng, good afternoon to you both.
Let's start with exactly what it is.
Urban mining sounds like there's a gold mine in the middle of a downtown somewhere, which is kind of misleading, but yet at the same time it's kind of what we're talking about.
Yeah, exactly, Steve.
You know, that's exactly what you've just described that the city is basically a giant warehouse of valuable materials waiting to be recovered.
And that can point to many, many things.
That can point to construction sites with cement, steel and aluminum, which most of them can be recycled and reused.
That also, for example, tied into our electronics.
You know, the smartphones you haven't been used by staying in your drawer for a couple of years.
And, according to a survey from Development Economics Group, That in Switzerland alone they have 7 million unused phones.
That's the data from 2023.
And that contains roughly 10 million US dollar worth of gold.
I'm not talking about equivalently.
I'm talking about real gold that can be recovered from these phones.
I am guilty as charged.
Me personally, I have three unused old phones from like 5, 10 years ago in my drawer right now.
People just don't know what to do with them.
Yeah, we don't know what to do with it.
So urban mining here is just about extracting those metals when produces and reach the end of their life.
When products, they reach to the end of their life and at the time when you don't need it anymore.
So it's not just about recycling trash.
It's about planning how to recover the used stuff into the entire livestock.
Yeah, creating a loop.
And we're talking about electronics like phones, but also computers, old laptops, perhaps even televisions.
And then the buildings that are all around us.
When those buildings are ready to come down, what's inside the construction of those buildings and the materials?
Those can be reused too.
And that's exactly what urban mining means.
So why does this matter?
Why has this become such a hot issue now?
Well, first of all, it's because right now we are resource hungry.
That for well.
When we are talking about, you know, green transition into clean energy, into more digital technology, that also means we need a huge amount of metals and minerals for the wind turbines, for solar panels, for EV batteries, hydrogen systems, but data centers on the chips that we use in our cars and our phones.
And so, according to OECD forecast, the global demand for materials like this is projected to more than double by the year 2060.
And so what exactly are these metals and materials?
For example, in solar panels, they actually rely on many of these critical minerals for efficiency and function.
For example, the main component is silicon, but they also need other things like silver copper, gallium and rare earth elements.
These are used for contacts, meaning they need these materials and minerals to capture the sunlight and then transform the light into electricity.
Okay.
So when we're talking about using fossil fuels for gas to power vehicles and we realized well, we're going to run out of fossil fuels eventually, so we have to find alternatives.
Now, things that are helping us and making our planet a better place, solar panels, for example.
We need things from the earth to make those things again.
Precisely.
Amongst others.
Yeah.
And those kind of mining action, these traditional mining action is actually hitting their limits too, because digging for new minerals out of just our soil, the ground, it actually brings heavy environmental and social costs.
For example, we all know lithium mining.
It's the source for making batteries for EV, for phones, for a lot of the products that we see and use every day.
But lithium mining is actually like a giant drinking all the water and tearing up the backyard of a certain geographical part of the land.
And here is one example from Chile.
Ever since the 1980s, lithium mining has been conducted in a salt flat in Chile, and the mining there has caused a significant loss of vegetation.
That's covering in areas where indigenous people actually farms and practice agricultural activities.
And it also led to the disappearance of lagoons, which are important, for it's a kind of lake, salt lake that's important for communities and local wildlife, such as Andean flamingo.
So the practice of human trying to mine for more lithium is actually causing the natural environment to kind of, you know, destroy the habitat for animals and people too.
You've just described habitat destruction, water pollution, high energy use emissions would come from this too.
I think you mentioned people have to move.
So that's community displacement.
And then, of course, the people who work in these environments.
It's oftentimes a dangerous place to work.
So there are many reasons to try to find And it's not just lithium.
The International Energy Agency, or the IEA, has warned that the demand for copper too, it's going to not meet the supply by 30 percent.
Demand will outstrip or be higher than supply by 30 percent within the next decade.
So there are numerous examples of things that we could look at.
We collect our old gadgets.
We collect our old materials.
And urban mining.
I guess one of the advantages is when we don't know what to do with things.
Urban mining gives us an answer.
Yeah, especially when we're talking about the traditional mining that Yushan just described.
Not only that, it brings destruction to habitats for animals and communities and polluting the environment, and there are also pollutions coming out from the processing of those metals and minerals, like smelting them or transporting them.
So now, when we look back at what we already extracted from the earth itself and we can sort of recover them and loop it back into our economy, into our society, and that really can help with dealing with this.
Traditional mining impacts on the environment.
For example, when it comes to construction, that happens to every country, every society, every day.
And, according to the Environmental Protection Agency in the US, in 2018 they generated about 600 million tons of construction and demolition waste.
That is actually twice as much as municipal solid waste, meaning you know everyday trash we generated from homes and businesses and institutions like food and paper and plastics.
And most of it also comes from tearing things down, not building new things.
So roughly 90% of them comes from demolishing old buildings and only 10% from new buildings.
So if we can reuse materials from construction sites like steel and aluminum, that means we don't need new mines to dig out new steels and new aluminum ores.
We already have it.
Yeah, we already have it.
We've already used it and we can use it again.
Yeah, exactly.
And that reduces the need to dig up new materials.
And that also reduces carbon footprints in the construction sector as well.
According to the UN Environmental Programme, The building and construction sector is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for roughly 40 of global emissions.
What about EV batteries?
We've talked numerous times about how electric vehicles are taking over.
Now customers are being incentivized to switch from a gas-powered vehicle to a battery-powered vehicle.
But what role do these play in urban mining?
Yeah.
As for EV, we've been talking about how the market has been expanding over the years.
So this is according to International Energy Agency that the global sales on EVs will reach 245 million units by 2030.
And if there are 245 million cars out there in use, then there will be an estimated more than 11 million tons of spent batteries.
And I remember, ever since the beginning of the booming of EV here in China, some people, including some of my family members who had doubts with EV, have been asking this question where are all the EV batteries going afterwards?
Because recycling EV batteries recovers valuable metals.
That's a nice thing to do.
And it reduces energy intensive mining and the pollution that comes with it and slows down the depletion of limited natural resources.
But Here is the bigger question.
How do EV batteries actually contaminate our ecosystem if they're not properly disposed of?
And that's gradually being more widely discussed in and outside of China as well.
So, as for a background, if we improperly dispose EV batteries, especially the lithium-ion batteries types, then that can contaminate ecosystem by releasing their hazardous content into soil and water.
So these batteries contain toxic heavy metals.
When left in landfills or just dumped without more processes, then the rainwater can actually cause these particles into the ground.
And even when we are trying to recycle and reuse these metals in the batteries themselves, it also requires really careful and proper procedure to do that.
Because when you try to extract these metals again from the batteries, most of the times some people in some workshops will be giving them acid baths or just burn them in open air.
And that leads to toxic waste of liquid and ash into our soil, our air, and even our water system.
And so you can see this, I think, a balancing act between yes, we want to push more of the green transition when it comes to transportation system, but what about the ripple effects coming out of it?
Yeah.
And the EV batteries are an issue already, but going to be more of an issue how to properly dispose of them and get back the materials within them that we can.
It's going to become a bigger issue.
But one thing that's already become a huge issue is things like our phones, our own electronics, our computers, our appliances.
All of those devices are now among the world's most rapidly expanding solid waste streams.
A few years ago, the planet generated about 62 million tons of that waste, but only about 20 was officially collected and processed for recycling.
Things like gold and copper and cobalt and lithium and rare earths can help.
If we, if we, get them back, they can uh, help new recycling industries, and there's other benefits too.
I mean, what's what's in a phone itself?
You have three in your house yusha, and i have at least one in my house uh, i'm guessing feifei, you have at least one, i don't even remember the numbers here.
So what are we doing wrong here?
What's inside those phones that can be taken out and then used again?
There's a lot of things.
First of all, there is gold in a smartphone.
And that is mainly used as a highly conductive, corrosion resistant material in tiny connectors on circuit boards and SIM trays and electrical contacts to ensure reliable electrical signals between different parts in our phone.
And then there are a lot of other metals.
But some of them are toxic, such as lead, mercury, and arsenic.
That's from screens and the solder on the phone.
That if not processed with care and just leave out there, that can also leak out as the phone breaks down as well.
So that's why we also need very careful recycling for the phones.
And I have a set of data from China here.
It's actually from a professor called Du Huangzheng from Tongji University.
He said in China, one metric ton of discarded smartphone can contain up to 280 grams of gold.
2000 grams of silver.
That is the equivalent to 60 times and 13 times for silver the concentration found in the ore in the mine themselves.
So you can see that the the vast potential.
It's worth it discarded phones have.
Yeah exactly, um.
All right, so let's talk about um construction and urban mining, because it starts at places in cities, at construction sites and building renovations.
And that can include your own home too, if you're renovating something like your kitchen or your bathroom.
Also demolition projects.
When we tear down buildings to make place for whatever it is we're going to replace them with.
Instead of treating the debris as trash.
Then the crews collect materials like the concrete and the wood and the metals and the glass and the wiring and the pipes and the so on and so forth.
But the sorting of those materials is equally important to collecting them in the first place.
Yet the steps is very crucial and there are different technologies and methods can be used to separate these materials.
For example, there are magnets that can pull out iron and steel, like the nails, the beams and essentially a lot of the things that we use in the construction site.
You know, within our buildings.
You don't know how many rebars, how many bars of steels are used to reinforce the buildings.
Hopefully a lot.
Yeah, definitely a lot.
And then there are also other things that cannot be pulled out by magnets, like non-ferrous metals, like aluminum and copper.
And that means metals without the iron in it.
And they also need to be separated for recycling.
But when it comes to manufacturing, these sort of connect, embed one another into a bigger system.
So you need different methods to separate them.
Like chemical contamination, like a small amount of iron or steel, can ruin an entire molten batch of aluminum or copper.
So you need some sort of way to separate them clearly, sort of purify them even.
And that's why the separation process for fairest versus non-fairest metals is so important.
Before the show, I didn't know what that was, what those were.
And I didn't know why this was so important.
But yeah, it's exactly what you said Feifei, because if these are not separated ferrous, by the way, are metals that contain iron and are magnetic, and non-ferrous is the opposite.
They have no iron and they're non-magnetic.
But a small amount of iron or steel can ruin an entire batch of aluminum if you don't do it properly.
So it's really really quite complicated in terms of how all of these things need to be sorted and separated from each other.
And it's been a technological bottleneck for many companies and industries out there, especially.
When it comes to separating these metals, I have an example from Tianjin.
There is a company who sort of specializes in copper smelting technique.
They are able to, you know, pressing purify the copper rods from used materials up to 99.995%.
Hard to do better than that.
And that you are able to stand in the market with this kind of technology.
And this level of purity exceeds the standard of ordinary smelted copper, making the copper widely applicable in manufacturing fields like aerospace, like new energy vehicles, like smartphones and other really high-precision copper foils.
Well, this is really cool because it reminds me of, you know, those open world games where you build a house, build something.
But if you want to relocate that or if you want to build something else, you can just break it and those things will just come back to ingredients.
And you collect them as ingredients and build it similar to stuff somewhere else.
From the click of a button.
Yeah 99, that's good enough.
Yeah, so i mean, what we're accomplishing here, if we do all of those things successfully, is we're completing a closed loop system where you take the materials from old buildings.
If we're talking specifically about construction here, the materials become resources.
Those resources are used to build new buildings.
Hence the closed loop system.
And again, that's what urban mining is.
It turns Cities.
If you imagine all the construction that takes place or has taken place in a city, everything all of a sudden becomes a resource bank.
And that's why we said it's kind of like a gold mine if you're thinking about resources, when you look around, when you're walking down the street.
But as we mentioned, or at least touched on briefly already, it's not easy.
There are a lot of difficulties that come with urban mining.
And one is the complexity of the waste that we talked about.
And I guess to expand on that a little bit more, you know if you think about not just ferrous versus non-ferrous metals.
But just think about your windows in your living room.
It's not just glass.
It's not just metal.
There's a lot of glue in there.
Things are glued together, coated, welded together sometimes.
So you have to separate those plastics and the metals and the chemicals and the composites.
And you can't damage them, by the way.
You can't damage them because they won't be able to be used again.
So that's really technically difficult and also time-consuming.
That's one of the big challenges.
Another is the collection system, I would think.
Yeah, because waste is generated in millions of homes.
We're talking about their home waste and then their construction site waste and business site waste.
Everything altogether put, putting in the entire system, is hard for managing and how we can get people to sort properly, return products and yeah, motivate people like me to, you know, kind of, recycle my three phones and avoid illegal dumping.
That requires coordination as well and also awareness from a very grassroots level.
Yeah, and then you have to.
And then once you get everyone on board and they know how to recycle properly, then you have to transport that waste.
And that's a difficult thing to do too, because that requires big heavy vehicles, big heavy trucks to do that.
Moving bulky heavy waste through crowded cities we're talking about is very, very expensive.
And that also requires not only trucks, but also you need places and facilities to store them.
And you also need to plan really carefully when it comes to when these trucks can go into the city, go in and out of the cities, and what routes can these trucks go.
And also when it comes to cities, for example in Beijing.
You also need to take into consideration about passenger traffic and you don't want your trucks to get stuck or increase the burden of the public transport already.
So that's a lot of questions that need to be answered.
And also on top of that, the trucks themselves are another emitter and polluter to many cities air quality.
And most of them diesel are powered by diesel.
And I think here in Beijing some of these fossil fuel powered trucks are prohibited to enter certain parts of the city.
They're only allowed to enter certain parts of the city during nights, not only because of the traffic, but also because of their emissions.
But there were also other ways.
There are new energy trucks that are already on the road currently.
But that also means that for the cargo that they transport, you need also to take some measures to, for example, cover up your cargo so that you can control the dust coming out from this waste.
And it's very detailed measures. work.
And that requires coordination not only among buildings and offices and homes, but also among different government agencies.
It's just a massive, massive system.
So let's talk about what China has done, because China does face a huge solid waste challenge.
There are stockpiles of over 600 billion tons of various industrial byproducts, but only 59 is recycled.
I don't know if that would be considered too low or too high, but it seems like a good starting point anyway.
There is fast-growing single-use packaging waste from e-commerce and deliveries that surpass 50 million tons a year.
We know how And we've talked about it on Roundtable numerous times how popular and how fast and efficient the deliveries are here.
But there's a downside to that, and that's what this is.
50 million tons per year in terms of that, but it only has a recycling rate of under 15%.
Construction demolition waste make up around 40 of urban solid waste and generates over 30 billion tons annually.
So what has China done to come up with some sort of measures, some sort of plan to deal with these problems?
For now, we already wrote out this comprehensive measure called Gu Fei Shi Tiao, or the New National Action Plan for managing the urban mining waste.
And also, this is a comprehensive full chain policy targeting waste reduction at the source.
And it improves process control, boosting recycling, and also it has strict enforcement.
So the goal is to curb waste growth and create a large scale market that aims for 45 billion tons of bulk solid waste reuse and 510 million tons of key resources recycled annually by 2030.
That's a long-term plan that we're already kind of trying to put in force and that's released very recently, I think starting from earlier this year right.
Yeah, and also not only that, I think, for when it comes to this action plan, it also sort of start to clarify on who is going to be responsible for this.
And the principle is For example, they are implementing an electronic waste tracking system.
They establish strict permits and environmental bonds that would hold producers responsible for waste treatment and cleanup.
So that is sort of also closing a regulatory loop.
And also when it comes to, for example.
There are also other challenges, for example, when it comes to regional developments.
You know I think we talked about this on Roundtable before is that when it comes to sorting and burning, reusing solid waste, we see a lot of gaps when it comes to, for example, more developed eastern regions.
Oh, meaning that they're able to take care of it more efficiently?
Yeah, and when it comes to the western central part of the country, they face a different problem.
And also when it comes to urban and rural areas that, especially for rural areas, they don't have the capacity to take care of a lot of the waste like household waste, like medical waste, like pesticide packaging and other solid waste.
Sometimes these must be transported to a nearby city.
That means higher cost and higher risks when it comes to the transportation process.
So with this action plan, it aims to also tackle these challenges as well.
Nothing's ever easy.
Nothing's ever easy.
And this is extremely complicated, the whole process of urban mining.
But is it worth it?
It absolutely sounds like it is.
And it sounds as well like there are plenty of plans in place to do as best they can.
