urban mining

Urban mining sounds like a really cool trend, and it probably is one, too. Why dig up the ground in search for diminishing mineral resources, when all we need is contained in the waste we discard every day? Recycling and reuse was yesterday, in the future we call it the urban mine.

Inspired by the Urban Mine Platform which lists the mindboggling amounts of metals that go to waste in Europe, I wrote a feature which came out in C&I a couple of months ago, I just forgot to shout about it (probably because the issue wasn't yet online when I checked and then I forgot about it). Anyhow, it's all online now, and if you can't get to it, drop me a line, I have the PDF file:

Urban mining

Chemistry & Industry 82, No. 7, pp 22-25.

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI (members only)

Here's a sneaky peek at the first page:

recycling without separating

From today, Oxford City Council introduces a new collection system for recyclables, where all dry recyclable materials go into a blue bin:



i.e. all plastics, glass, cardboard, paper, tins, etc. together. The little green thing takes food waste, while the big green bin is for the residual non-recyclable waste, of which there is very little. The council says it hopes to improve its recycling rate from around 40 % to over 50% with this scheme.

While the new system includes more types of material than the previous one and saves me the trouble to take some stuff to bring banks, I am having trouble to imagine how they plan to separate the stuff out. And after 30 years of separating recyclables, it goes against all my instincts to throw them all in the same bin. Guess our blue bin will be unusual in that it will always contain a layer of plastic, then a layer of paper, then glass ...

peak phosphorus

By now, most people have heard that fossil fuels are a limited resource, but with other resources we are still behaving as if we had a few more planets up our sleeves. One of the most limiting resources is phosphorus, which currently comes from mining in only a small number of countries. Experts predict that peak production may come as soon as 2034, or even sooner if oil peaks before that date. Therefore, recycling schemes aiming to recover phosphorus from sewage residue should be treated as a high priority. I have looked at the situation and the recycling options in a news feature which appears in today's issue of Current Biology (complete with a nice reproduction of "The Alchymist" by Joseph Wright of Derby, showing Brandt's discovery of P): Fears over phosphorus supplies Current Biology, Volume 20, Issue 9, R386-R387, 11 May 2010 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.04.031 FREE access to full text and PDF file