Mining Waste - Street Cleansing in the UK

Waste is produced in huge quantities the world over, and as such must be considered as a viable resource if we are ever to establish a circular economy.
One way in which cities can be ‘farmed’ for valuable product in their waste is through street sweeping. In the past all street sweepings have been sent straight to landfill due to their ‘mix of dust, leaves, stones, cans and plastic bottles’, but now companies such as Veolia have developed new machinery combining sieves, conveyors and washers to create a process that is essentially a modern-day up-date of panning for gold.
Collected cans and bottles can be sent for recycling and stones used for restoration work. Even the remaining dust can be treated to extract traces of precious metals such as platinum, rhodium and palladium, which have ended up in exhaust fumes after being used in catalytic converters (combining with pollutants and thereby lessening those pollutants’ harmfulness).
Industry such as this should be the way forward; sustainable and economical – Veolia have generated over £150 million in selling materials extracted from that which was deemed waste and have simultaneously remained a net carbon positive company – city streets have inadvertently become a gold mine.
Currently separation plants are situated away from the large cities where this ‘waste’ is collected but this does not have to be the case – collection, processing and export could all be incorporated into a city’s working environment.

Contributed by: Bridget Bale