Takeover*: The Urban Mining Valley!

As is well known, the Ruhr region has a history spanning decades of lignite and hard coal mining. As early as the 19th century, the economic focus was on the iron and steel industry. The coal and steel industry, including many workers from abroad, drove significant urban growth at that time. Due to the coal crisis in the 20th century, mining operations were ultimately shut down in 2018, after a full 150 years of mining.

So what now? Where do our current and future materials come from today? And what does the use of secondary raw materials look like? A 100-square-meter apartment alone contains 7,500 kg of metals, and 1.6 billion cell phones contain around 38 metric tons of gold. One potential solution: the circular economy as a source of raw materials. “Urban mining” can be translated as “urban mining.” Until recently, the term was primarily associated with the excavation of old landfills. However, the central aspect of the urban mining approach is recycling – the reuse of materials. Urban mining helps reduce raw material shortages, as well as the massive import of raw materials and the emission of harmful carbon dioxide (CO₂).

Rainer Weichbrodt is considered one of the pioneers of the concept of urban mining in our region; he has been actively promoting the topic since 2008 and, together with several partners, launched the “Urban Mining Congress” in 2010, which was last held in Dortmund in 2018.

He also founded Urban Mining e.V., based in Essen. Weichbrodt is the managing partner of Management Institut Dortmund GmbH (MID) and likes to refer to urban mining as the “new mining industry of the Ruhr region.” His reasons for this are as follows: First, the high rate of urbanization, including the high population density in the region. With over 5 million people, the Ruhr region can be described as one large city. Second, in Weichbrodt’s view, a structural transformation driven by environmental technologies could be established here in the Ruhr region because this is precisely where academic expertise is at its highest. In this context, he likes to refer to the term “Urban Mining Valley.” Weichbrodt: “My vision is to drive this forward – that is, to promote technologies that will allow us to position ourselves as a business hub and set global trends. In this way, we naturally also strengthen and improve the Ruhr region as a business hub.”

“For me, urban mining is about harnessing and recognizing that raw materials are increasingly shifting from deposits in the earth to deposits in cities. More and more materials are being used from the earth. Copper, for example, is a material that already exists in infrastructure on a larger scale today than as a resource in the earth, and many other materials will follow a similar path in the future, especially rare metals. So I no longer have the raw materials in the ground, but rather in use—and in a variety of ways due to urbanization in the city—and that’s exactly why we need to make use of this resource in the future. In this context, people are viewed not only as consumers but also as producers of valuable resources.” His appeal: “It’s up to everyone to dispose of valuable metals and raw materials properly in order to support the environment, society, and our own economy,” Weichbrodt summarizes his definition.

As early as the 1960s, the American-Canadian urban and architectural critic Jane Jacobs referred to cities as mines. Mines in the sense that a great deal of raw materials are incorporated into urban infrastructure, which can later be reused. But consumer goods such as electrical appliances, wind turbines, solar panels, cars, as well as buildings and waste in landfills are also our secondary raw materials today. Urban mining involves the following processes: “prospecting, exploration, development, and extraction of anthropogenic deposits through to the processing of the recovered secondary raw materials.” The four pillars of the urban mining strategy: Design for Urban Mining, Resource Cadastre, Urban Prospecting, and Resource Recovery.

To conclude the discussion on urban mining, here is the formal definition from the Federal Environment Agency: “Urban mining is the integrated management of anthropogenic deposits with the aim of recovering secondary raw materials from durable goods and waste deposits. It does not matter whether the goods are still in active use and will only be released in the foreseeable future, or whether they have already reached the end of their useful life.”

If you’re looking for a simple and concise explanation of the term “urban mining,” you’ll find it in this video.

Text author: Stephanie Stiehm

* Starting with the takeover in January 2022, lala.ruhr will be taking over the Instagram account of vier.ruhr – the alliance of Mülheim’s theaters – for three weeks. Our theme: the “trash complex.” We’ll take you on a digital journey through the region and beyond – to places where something is created from trash or where people work with what we colloquially call “trash.” We invite you to think about the urban landscape of the Ruhr Metropolis in circular terms and to discover all materials as part of cycles. For us, trash is fundamentally a resource and a treasure trove for new things – not simply waste. lala.ruhr defines waste as the raw material of the future! For this reason, you’ll also find several blog posts this month on the topic of the “Waste Complex.” This first blog post on “Urban Mining” explores the idea that the Ruhr region can be not only a consumer but also a sustainable resource.

vier.ruhr is the theater alliance comprising Theater an der Ruhr, the Mülheim Theater Days “Stücke,” and Ringlokschuppen Ruhr. Funded as part of the NEUE WEGE program by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in cooperation with the NRWKULTURsekretariat.

Sources:

Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) (2019): Mining in the Ruhr. From Industrialization to the Coal Crisis. https://www.bpb.de/apuz/283262/der-ruhrbergbau-von-der-industrialisierung-bis-zur-kohlenkrise#footnode10-10

Deutschlandfunk Kultur (2018): Hard Coal Mining in the Ruhr Region. The End of an Era. https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/steinkohle-bergbau-im-ruhrgebiet-schicht-im-schacht-100.html

Management Institut Dortmund GmbH (MID) (2010): Urban Mining—Environmental Experts from the Ruhr Region Are Driving the Issue Forward. http://www.mi-dortmund.de/urban-mining-umweltexperten-aus-dem-ruhrgebiet-treiben-das-thema-an/

Management Institut Dortmund GmbH (MID) (2012): The URBAN MINING® Award 2012 http://www.mi-dortmund.de/der-urban-mining%c2%ae-award-2012/

Federal Environment Agency (UBA) (2017): Urban Mining. https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/abfall-ressourcen/abfallwirtschaft/urban-mining#strategie-zur-kreislaufwirtschaft-

Urban Mining Design (n.d.): Urban Mining. Basic Information for Sustainability Novices. https://www.urban-mining-design.de/index.php?id=basisinformationen-fuer-laien