Economic Optimization of Urban Mining

This paper presents a general approach when performing urban mining activities. The urban miningconcept is a necessity when the Mega cities increase in numbers to create attractive, sustainable cities formodern people. There are veins of precious minerals that are richer than any goldmine, running through ourcities. The equality principle is applied on urban mining in order to simultaneously optimize the economy, thetechnology used and the environmental conditions in general. Shadow costs are employed to give economicincentives to improve the current urban mining activities. A versatile key factor is introduced that providesmanagement with a tool to immediately obtain a general status report of their urban mining project. A Swedishoffice block is the object of a case study. Thereby, special focus is on the least important fractions with apositive value from an economic point of view that are intended to be optimized. The introduced approachshows utility and the model for Efficient Use of Resources for Optimal Production Economy (EUROPE) givesreasonable results when applying the equality principle on urban mining business. The major benefit with thisstudy is the introduction of a novel method to improve urban mining projects of all kinds featuring conversionof all technical and environmental aspects of a project into all-embracing monetary measures. It is recommendedto apply the equality principle and its mathematical expression, the EUROPE model, on recycling activities ingeneral and particularly on urban mining projects.

کلیدواژه ها:

Urban mining ، Optimization ، Residuals ، Ultimate zero waste concept ، Equality principle ، EUROPE model