Urban Mining. This is a British article which is actually about recycling. We toss a lot of stuff, some of it is valuable, electronics for example, most of it is worthless. The author talked about the need for a "well sorted waste stream" but never got around to saying how the sorting might be done. Do we want to force homeless people to stand at the dump sorting glass bottles by color and grabbing the odd piece of electronics out of the waste stream? I don't think so.
Up here in New Hampshire we have the sorting mostly under control. We have separate bins for glass bottles, tin cans, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, newspapers. magazines, miscellaneous paper, old clothes, cardboard, and electronics. Only the electronics, mostly dead TV sets and dead desktop computers, seems to have much potential of yielding rare earth metals, or lithium, or copper or gold or silver. The town dump (transfer station for the trendy minded) sends the electronics off somewhere, I don't know where, every so often. Where ever the stuff goes, it is a pretty well sorted waste stream for "urban mining".
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