Wealth from waste: can urban mining save the planet?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2022
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ivana Davidovic investigates urban mining - the process of reclaiming raw materials from spent products, buildings and waste. She looks at what new technologies are helping us to recycle waste and the benefits that could bring.
In Antwerp, Belgium, she visits Umicore, once a traditional smelting company, which now specialises in extracting precious metals from electronics - and then puts them into new products, like catalysts or car battery components.
On the other side of the world - in Sydney, Australia - professor and inventor Veena Sahajwalla explains her innovative way to produce so-called "green steel."
Jessika Richter, a researcher from Lundt University in Sweden, tells us why the booming electric vehicles industry will increasingly have to find raw materials for batteries outside of conventional mining. Heather Clancy, the editor of the US-based Green Biz magazine, says US carmakers are now investing in urban mining.
Pascal Leroy, the director-general of the WEEE Forum, discusses how re-using waste can help the rest of the world become less dependent on rare earth materials which come from Russia, China and Ukraine.
PHOTO: Aerial view waste management facility with cityscape background/Getty Images
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily with me Ivana Devidovich. In today's program, we look at urban mining, |
| 0:07.2 | a way of extracting raw materials from waste which could help save the planet. China and Russia are |
| 0:12.4 | sitting on the materials that we need for that energy transition, for that decarbonized economy. |
| 0:17.7 | Tapping into the urban mine is actually a means to reduce your dependency on |
| 0:23.3 | third countries. And what new technologies are helping us recover useful materials from things |
| 0:28.5 | that are already made or built? This is where my love for coffee comes in very handy, thank you |
| 0:35.0 | very much, because it's the coffee waste, |
| 0:41.6 | a beautiful source of elements like carbon and hydrogen. |
| 0:44.8 | And this is why this future generation that we're working on is that ambitious next phase of complete elimination of coal and cork |
| 0:49.8 | from electric car furnace steelmaking. |
| 0:52.3 | That's all coming up in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:11.0 | In my quest to find out more about how we can extract wealth. Oh, nice to meet you. The safety glass needs to be worn at certain places. |
| 1:17.1 | In my quest to find out more about how we can extract wealth from waste, I travelled to Antwerp in Belgium. |
| 1:18.3 | I'm here to talk to Tieri van Kerkhoven from Yomikor, a once traditional smelting company |
| 1:22.8 | which became an urban mining pioneer specialising in precious metals. |
| 1:27.2 | We are looking here at the sampling installation for electronic scrap. |
| 1:31.3 | So what we are doing here is that first of all we are shredding the circuit boards |
| 1:36.3 | to something like 12 centimeters particle size. |
| 1:39.3 | At the later stage we are doing a further size reduction to 4 cm |
| 1:43.3 | and then in a fully automated way we are doing a further size reduction to four centimeters, and then in a fully |
| 1:45.0 | automated way, we will take a sample. |
| 1:48.5 | So what we're looking at here is enormous bags and boxes of electronic waste all sort of cut |
... |
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