What is urban mining and why should you do it?

A copper shortage means we all need to take up “urban mining” — but put the shovel down as we’re not heading back to the mines, just having a root around the old tech drawer.

Everyone has one: a drawer or cupboard in the home office. Perhaps a box sitting forgotten in the loft or garage. And they’re stuffed full of old smartphones, laptops and mysterious cables that no longer seem to have a counterpart.

Well, those bits and bobs of old tech are full of copper — and copper is necessary for decarbonisation, notes British charity organisation Recycle Your Electricals.

With a name like that, it’s clear this is all part of the organisation’s mission, but you can’t argue with the numbers: a survey indicates there’s 823 million old or broken tech gadgets tucked away in our homes, two-thirds of which are cables.

We’re pretty sure a million or so belong to TechFinitive staff.

Urban mining your cables

Cables in particular hold a lot of copper. Recycle Your Electricals cites research by the Critical Minerals Association saying that cables are made up of 20% copper.

That means that, in the UK, our collective tangle of cables and old gadgetry holds more than 38,000 tonnes of copper. If so, it’s a shade less than a third of the amount we need to power the decarbonisation of Britain’s electricity grid.

That’s because copper is used in key infrastructure such as wind turbines and solar panels. Because of that, demand is outpacing production of copper, so it makes sense to mine our out-of-date tech for the material to help fill some of the gap.

“People may not realise that cables and electricals contain valuable materials, not just copper, and that if binned or stashed, we lose everything inside of them when we don’t recycle them into something new,” said Scott Butler, Executive Director of Recycle Your Electricals.

“We need to start ‘urban mining’ and help protect the planet and nature from the harmful impacts of mining for raw materials and instead value and use what we have already.”

And in case you’re wondering, according to the number crunchers we’ve got £266 million worth of copper sitting waiting to be mined.

Copper conflict

Urban mining brings new life to these products, but it also reduces the need for actual mining of copper — a process that’s hard on the environment and on people.

While tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold are the four main conflict minerals, copper is associated with conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Papua New Guinea, as well as environmental concerns in Argentina.

A report by Bloomberg Intelligence to coincide with Recycle Your Electricals’ campaign suggested that the copper tucked away in our homes or binned in landfill would deliver a fifth of the UK’s annual demand. It won’t solve the problems inherent in our reliance on copper, but it will help.

“Supplying the world’s copper requirements over the next 10 years is going to be challenging, with the market potentially facing severe shortages in five to ten years,” said Grant Sporre, Senior Analyst, Metals and Mining at Bloomberg Intelligence.

“All the shallow, easy-to-extract copper deposits have been mined out. Securing social and environmental approval to build new mines is becoming harder, and it can take up to 15 years to commence mining.”

The drive to decarbonise via wind and solar farms as well as switching from internal combustion to electric cars means copper demand could grow by 2.5% to 3% per annum, he added, causing a gap between supply and demand of as much as 6.5 tonnes globally in the next decade.

“Better recycling practices and efficiencies will be needed to close this gap,” said Sporre. “Increasing the proportion of recycled copper to 50% from current levels of 30%  would be a significant challenge for global supply chains but could potentially meet the additional demand.”

How to go urban mining

So let’s get urban mining — or suburban, as the case may be. First step, find your “drawer of doom”, as Recycle Your Electricals calls it — it may also be a “cabinet of horrors,” “loft of terror” or “box of untold mysteries”.

Regardless, it will look like a rats’ nest of cables, irredeemably tangled despite not moving for a decade. Scattered among the loops and knots will be smartphones so old they have keyboards, a digital camera or other ephemera from ancient times.

Take that box and sort it. Keep any cables you know you will need. If you’re unsure, check it against the gadget in question now. If you can’t be bothered to do that, admit you’ll never use it and chuck it in a bag with your other donatable items.

One note of caution: check if you have wiped smartphones and laptops before donating, if it’s still possible to power them up.

Then, find your nearest recycling locations by entering in your post code and items to be recycled here.

Retailers like Currys and John Lewis will generally accept waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) for recycling, but it’s worth checking before you haul your bag of cables.

Some local authorities will take small electrical items or have drop-off banks, so check your council, too.

Next, pat yourself on the back: you’ve recycled some old kit, helped with the copper shortage, reduced our reliance on conflict minerals, and cleared out that messy drawer.

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