Urban Mining: A New Epistemology for Social Justice

• In Event: STS Underground: Responsible and Sustainable Mining

Abstract

The global conversation about mitigating climate change is now driven by an almost singular focus on deep decarbonization, or the electrification of everything. Many imagine our future lives as powered by stored electricity, derived from renewable sources. The grand challenges of the Anthropocene includes balancing our global dream to electrify everything with the brutal fact that clean energy technologies depend on metals mined using nearly medieval techniques. This paper explores urban mining as an alternative.

Urban mining is defined as the recycling of materials from the technosphere: the buildings, industrial facilities, and consumer devices that make up our lives. Urban mining constitutes an emergent epistemology. It is distinct from “virgin” mining, not just because of its non-rural geography, but in terms of the infrastructures, institutions, and instruments employed. Urban mining also constitutes a form of disruptive innovation that shifts patterns of consumption and waste collection.

To crack open this new epistemology on mining, I investigate urban mining as an assemblage of discourses, objects, practices and subject positions. I am interested in who urban miners are and how they collect valuable metals. I explore the multitude of training and research programs taking hold in Europe, which are light years ahead of US trends. I theorize that this lag is rooted in a vastly different continental resource geography, deeply seated antagonism between the urban and rural, and a uniquely American consumer psyche -- all in the context of a pro-mining Trump agenda.

Author

• Roopali Phadke, Macalester College