Urban mining and resource management in times of raw material shortage : (using the First World War as an example)

Abstract

Surpassing the common notion of "recycling", the recently coined term "urban mining" denotes the recovery of recyclable raw materials from anthropogenic sources (i.e., usually from waste). Unlike "classic" recycling, the term includes not only the re-use, but also the active prospection for stocks of the materials in question (e.g. metals or phosphorous) in the infrastructure, information about which is crucial for future recovery of these resources. At the centre of this thesis stands the question of how and to what extent our infrastructure can be utilized as a secondary source for those raw materials (e.g. metals) which already form a part of the anthropogenic metabolism, but for which a situation of more or less acute shortage may arise, leading to the need of treating the anthroposphere as a raw material deposit to be exploited. The issue of shortage of primary resources has already been a problem in the past, for example during war or due to embargoes. Therefore, this thesis will treat the problem mainly by analyzing the example of the Austrian war economy during World War I, when raw materials had indeed to be substituted by secondary sources. By means of material flow analysis, the cases of two important raw materials will be looked at: iron, as the most extensively used and most important metal, and copper, as the scarcer and most important non-ferrous metal. It will be shown that the cases of copper and iron strongly differed. On the basis of these differences, and the different approaches taken for recovery of iron and copper, issues of efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of "urban mining" strategies will be highlighted.