Prospecting Secondary Raw Materials in the Urban Mine and mining wastes (ProSUM) Recommendations Report

Report, 2017

This Report presents the recommendations arising from the ProSUM Project. It contains recommendations designed to continue to improve the knowledge base for secondary raw materials with the overarching objective of increasing recycling and supply of such materials. It specifically addresses data availability, data quality, data harmonisation, data structure and data presentation.

The report contains a complete list of recommendations arising from the work undertaken in the project covering the ‘urban mine’ of electrical and electronic equipment, batteries and vehicles, their wastes, and mining wastes. It is the culmination of three years’ work which has resulted in:
• The characterisation of products in terms of CRM content;
• A comprehensive review and screening of all available data to characterise products;
• An assessment of the factors affecting CRM content in products and the future trends for products;
• A comprehensive review of existing and development of new methodologies for sampling and analysis
of products;
• An assessment of the current stocks of products held in households and business;
• The quantification of flows of waste products not captured by national reporting on producer compliance;
• A new model to quantify stocks and flows of products, their waste and material flows;
• A comprehensive review and screening of all available data to characterise waste flows;
• A comprehensive review of existing and development of new methodologies for sampling and analysis
of wastes;
• An evaluation of relevant product waste flows and mining wastes deposits;
• Creation of the Urban Mine Platform (UMP) including a unified data model and code lists and meta data
system;
• Expansion of the Minerals Knowledge Data Platform (MKDP) for mining wastes;
• And a new harmonised classification system to describe data in the urban mine.