SUM 2012 - Symposium on Urban Mining

The urban space should be conceived as the physical, or virtual, environment intended for collective use where rights and duties of citizenship, social information and education, political action, productive and economic activities are carried out. Urban Mining represents actions and technologies that can be adopted to recover resources from residues produced by the urban catabolism (municipal, industrial and agricultural waste, both from new production and old deposits) in terms of secondary raw materials and energy. It implicates progression beyond separate collection and the current logic of consumers responsibility, resulting in an increased recovery of resources, better quality of the same, improved environmental protection, involvement of producer responsibility and lower costs for society. With no demagogy or ideological escapes from the fundamental role of treatment and final disposal techniques in closure of the material cycle.