Call for papers for a Special Volume of the Journal of Cleaner Production on Sustainable Urban Mining: Potential, Impact, and Management
摘要截稿:
全文截稿: 2019-02-15
影响因子: 7.246
期刊难度:
CCF分类: 无
中科院JCR分区:
• 大类 : 环境科学与生态学 - 1区
• 小类 : 工程:环境 - 1区
• 小类 : 环境科学 - 1区
• 小类 : 绿色可持续发展技术 - 1区
Overview
1. Introduction
In the past decades, the enormous reallocation of resources from in-ground ore deposits to urban systems (Rauch, 2009), the transition toward more circular economy (Jones et al., 2013), and the needs to diversify the supply sources (primary and secondary) of critical materials (Rademaker et al., 2013) have profoundly changed the landscape and practices of anthropogenic resource management system. Hence, more emphasis is being placed on exploration and exploitation of resources from urban systems. Urban Mining, a rediscovered slogan at the end of the twentieth century in the field of waste management, refers to the process of reclaiming compounds and elements from any kind of anthropogenic stocks, including buildings, infrastructure, and products (in and out of use), as secondary materials supply (Baccini and Brunner, 2012; Cossu and Williams, 2015).
Urban mining originally concentrated upon products (e.g., waste electrical and electronic equipment, vehicles, and batteries) that contain critical materials of high economic value. The immense complexity in modern products’ design and limited knowledge of products in or out of use, to a great extent, hampers the traceability of critical materials at their end-of-life stage (Habib et al., 2015), which is a fundamental stepping stone toward an efficient anthropogenic resources management system. Information about the quantity, form, and location are still scarce and fragmented (Field et al., 2017; Restrepo et al., 2017; Widmer et al., 2015). To facilitate the realization of circular economy and secure a sustainable access to critical materials, more in-depth knowledge and structured data on their quantities, characteristics, location, and patterns are urgently needed (Thiébaud et al., 2017).
Waste collection and recycling is another major limiting factor of the management systems for anthropogenic resources (Løvik et al., 2018). Current waste collection and recycling systems typically recover base materials, such as steel, aluminum, and copper, but fail to reclaim the critical materials that are sparsely distributed in products, largely due to the lack of appropriate collection and recovery technologies (Løvik et al., 2018), economic incentives (Zeng et al., 2018), and recyclable product design (Cheung et al., 2015). To facilitate waste collection and recycling, several countries are rolling out pilot online platforms based on new techniques or business models, such as eRecyclingCorps, uSell, and Gazalle in the US, fonebank in the UK, Waste Exchange in Australia, and Aihuishou and Yizaisheng in China (Corder et al., 2014; Sun et al., 2018). New techniques or business models (e.g., Internet of Things and E-commerce) could be the game-breaker solution that fundamentally changes the current ineffective waste collection and recycling system, but they also bring up additional challenges, such as required infrastructure support, information security, and business models’ profitability.
The urban built environment per se holds a large portion of raw and manufactured resources (e.g., metals, aggregates, concrete, bricks, plasterboards, glass, polymers and plastics, and wood) that have been accumulated overtime. Massive amounts of secondary materials sourced from the anthropogenic stocks in urban built environment are foreseen in the coming decades in both developed and developing countries. Limited studies have approached this direction. Several well-established techniques (e.g., Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote sensing) or methods (e.g., Material Flow Analysis (MFA)) have been employed to inventory the quality and quantity of materials in the urban built environment (Ergun and Gorgolewski, 2015; Krook et al., 2015), to map the distribution of anthropogenic stocks at various spatial resolutions (Kleemann et al., 2016; Stephan and Athanassiadis, 2018; Tanikawa and Hashimoto, 2009), and to identify the prospective hotspots of urban mines (Cheng et al., 2018). To deepen our understanding of the characteristics and dynamics of anthropogenic stocks, more efforts on data retrieving techniques and characterization models are still needed.
Legislation is an important factor that must be considered when minding a closed-loop anthropogenic resources management system. Legislative framework should be redesigned to effectively facilitate the urban mining practices. For example, the Chinese waste import ban puts Europe at crossroads because substantial amounts of waste were exported to China and other countries in the global south. The best and only long-term solution is to avoid waste at source, which requires a revolutionary transformation in legislation related to products’ design and end-of-life stages.
2. Topical areas
This “Call for Papers” (CfPs) for the SV of the Journal of Cleaner Production (JCLP) aims to systematically assess the potentials, opportunities, barriers, and impacts of urban mining, and synthesize technological progress, business models, and policy change in different cities, countries, and regions for different industry and product categories. We welcome theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and review papers, from a broad variety of disciplines (e.g., engineering, economics, management, entrepreneurship, environmental studies, to mention a few) and stakeholders (e.g., scholars, industrial researchers, and business and governmental officers). Papers should include comprehensive, up-to-date literature reviews, combined with novel theoretical and experimental investigations.
Potential topics of interest for this Special Volume include, but not limited to, the following aspects of urban mining:
- Systematic reviews of previous studies that summarize our state of knowledge and propose future directions on urban mining research
- Empirical case studies of urban mining in different cities, countries, and regions and for different product categories
- Characterization of anthropogenic stocks and urban mining potentials
- Potentials of mobile anthropogenic stocks (e.g., waste electrical and electronic equipment, batteries, and automobiles)
- Potentials of built-environment anthropogenic stocks (e.g., buildings, transportation, and communication networks)
- New aids (e.g., GIS, remote sensing, and other multisource data aided techniques) for characterizing anthropogenic resources deposit and urban mining potential
- Classification and terminology of anthropogenic resources and urban mining potential
- New technologies and innovative business models (e.g., Internet of Things and E-commerce) for anthropogenic resources management and urban mining
- Product design and legislative development for urban mining management, such as cradle-to-grave product design, life cycle management, supply chain management, and policy effects evaluation
- Resources, environmental, health, and social impacts of urban mining
- The role of different stakeholders (industry, governmental agencies, consumers) in urban mining and sustainable anthropogenic resources management