Urban Mining

It takes 245kg of fossil fuels, 22kgs of chemicals, and 1500 litres of water to manufacture one desktop computer.

Ultimately 80-85% of all electronic products are discarded in landfills or incinerators releasing toxins into the air and soil. Circuit boards rely on silver and gold for their excellent electrical conductivity. In the United States alone cell phones containing $60 million of gold and silver are dumped every year.

Ashley Heather refining process begins with manually dismantling the waste electronic products. All the components are then sent their separate ways for recycling and the circuit boards are run through a shredder before being fed into the furnace. All the metals, including high quantities of copper, are collected as a sludge. The precious metals are separated and purified and then melted again in the final stage to ensure a pure, high quality material.

“For the past five years we have been working in silver reclaimed from photographic waste but as was inevitable traditional dark room photography is something of a dying art and our ability to extract enough silver from the waste chemicals was growing more and more tenuous. We started to explore other sources of recycled silver and landed on circuit boards because the are abundant but more importantly it is precisely this abundance which I think makes them such a key component in any strategy for a more sustainable approach to waste. I have always been passionate about single source recycled metals as I believe they offer more accountability and  transparency than more generic mixed source recycled silver. Precious metals are an amazing substances to work in but with all the environmental and social issues directly and indirectly associated with the mining industry I have been adamant since the beginning that I wanted to offer my customers an alternative to these harmfully extracted metals.” Heather explains.

Urban Mining
Design: Ashley Heather