Urban Mining - Project Description - Yihan+Daosheng

In the post-work society, people are not bound to their jobs, and they are free to create their own life. Under this big picture, automation has already replaced manufacture, and the macroeconomy could sustain living with leisure activities. We propose a system of urban mining, in which the materials in the city will be collected and processed by robots, and send to people or manufacturers who need those materials.

The concept of Urban Mining is seeing the city as a mine for raw materials. Raw materials are becoming increasingly scarce, so we have to look at more sources as alternative sites for exploration, such as electronic waste, vehicles or demolished buildings. The goal is enabling an intelligent use of resources, which starts with the design of a product and an efficient resource recovery. Thus, people are considered not only as consumers but also as producers of valuable resources. Urban mining is a process of reclaiming compounds and elements from products, building and waste. Currently, the predominant product-use is a linear Take-Make-Waste model, in which we take a material, use it to create a product, and when people have finished using the product we send it to the waste, often called the end-of-the-pipe. And what we are proposing is a system bridging the Make and Waste.

We locate our urban mining system in Detroit, since the city itself has produced large amount of wastes which were not appropriately processed or recycled. The architecture which is the center of storing and processing materials spreads throughout the whole city, and the locations are based on the density of manufacturers. Each center sends out robots to scan and collect materials on the streets, and the range covers up the whole city. The robots have sensors to intelligently recognize waste materials and transport to corresponding receiving centers. Then these storing centers will sort them into categories, clean them, and ready for people to pick up. The materials have a wide range, since the urban mining system serves for both large industries such as automobile and electronics factories and individuals. The materials vary from all kinds of metals, wood, paper, plastics, glasses, and etc.

The architecture of the storing center consists of multiple cells. The size of each storage center varies according to the collecting range and the area’s amount of need for certain materials. Each cell has different size to accommodate different types of materials. There are two levels, where the ground level serves for both robot circulation and the first-phase receiving materials. Each cell has a connection with the robots for transporting in the materials. Then the materials get processed and sent to the second level.