Urban mining / Recycling

Projektbeschreibung (englisch)

Urban mining is a project about the recovery of strategic and precious metals from electric and electronic devices. The purpose is to develop an integrated approach which is based on value creating technologies (instead of value destroying technologies which require non-sustainable funding, such as subsidies). The PhD work will focus on the investigation of the opportunity to implement the Product Service Systems (PSS) concept to achieve a closed loop supply chain for strategic and precious metals in small electronic products (e.g. mobile phones and smartphones). This novel, high-impact and potentially transformative approach to supplying goods and services presents major business opportunities. Implementing such a PSS system is expected to be able to encompass a link between the incentive scheme of market actors (producers, consumers and end-of-life managers) and the “life cycle” of products/resources. Finally, the results of the work will be the basis for defining new fields of business for companies operating along the chain of product provision.