Somewhere in your house is a drawer full of dead phones, old laptop chargers, and a cable for a device you no longer own. Multiply that drawer by every household on the planet and you get one of the strangest resource deposits in existence. Richer, per tonne, than most gold mines on Earth. Welcome to urban mining.
What is urban mining?
Urban mining is the recovery of metals and minerals not from rock, but from the things we’ve already built, used, and discarded phones, laptops, circuit boards, cars, and increasingly, battery packs. The term was coined in Japan in the late 1980s [1], a country with almost no domestic mineral reserves but, it turns out, one of the richest “mines” in the world sitting in its own cities.
Japan took the idea seriously enough that by the 2010s its urban stockpile of metals like indium, tin and tantalum accounted for over 10% of world reserves [1], not mined from the ground, but sitting in drawers, landfills, and recycling centres.
The number that gets repeated for good reason
Here’s the fact every urban mining article leads with, and it holds up: there is roughly 100 times more gold in a tonne of old mobile phones than in a tonne of gold ore [2]. Some estimates from the UN put the ratio even higher for the richest e-waste streams up to 800 times the concentration of a good mining ore [2].
Put in absolute terms: a typical gold mine yields 1-3 grams of gold per tonne of rock. A tonne of shredded circuit boards can yield 250-350 grams [2]. Your old iPhone, individually, holds about 0.034g of gold, 0.34g of silver and 0.015g of palladium [2]. Not much on its own, but multiply that by the roughly 1.2 billion smartphones sold every year and you start to see why “phone recycling” is really a mining operation wearing a lowercase hoodie.
Globally, the numbers get properly large. The UN’s Global E-Waste Monitor 2024 put annual e-waste at 62 million tonnes, containing an estimated $91 billion in embedded metal: $19bn of copper, $15bn of gold, $16bn of iron [3]. E-waste stockpiles are now thought to hold around 16% of the world’s gold reserves [2]. Less than 20% of that e-waste is currently recycled formally [2], which either sounds like a crisis or the best-telegraphed business opportunity in modern industry, depending on your mood.
The Olympic medals made from your old phone
The best urban mining story of the last decade happened in plain sight. For the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, Japan ran a two-year national collection drive: yellow bins in post offices, schools, and electronics shops, with over 90% of local authorities and 2,100 electronics retailers participating [4].
The haul: 78,985 tonnes of e-waste, including 6.21 million old phones [4]. From it, they extracted every gram of metal needed for all 5,000 Olympic and Paralympic medals: 70 lbs of gold, 7,700 lbs of silver, 4,850 lbs of bronze [4]. The gold alone worth around $2 million [4]. Every medal awarded at that Games had, at some point, been somebody’s old flip phone. That is urban mining working exactly as advertised, at national scale, with a global TV audience watching the payoff.
Where batteries fit in
Batteries are their own urban mining story, and arguably the more consequential one, because unlike a phone’s gold trace, an EV battery pack is designed around materials worth recovering: lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, copper, graphite.
When a pack is shredded for recycling, the result is a dark, gritty powder the industry calls black mass. Genuinely the term, no euphemism intended and it trades like a commodity. In 2026, a tonne of NCM black mass carries roughly $8,700 of recoverable lithium, nickel and cobalt value; even LFP black mass, long considered barely worth recycling, now carries around $3,170/tonne [5]. Lithium alone makes up 55% of NCM black mass value despite being only 14% of its weight [5]. Proof that in battery recycling, rarity beats bulk.
Companies have built entire business models on this. Redwood Materials (founded by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel) now recovers up to 95% of the nickel, cobalt, lithium and copper from spent packs, and in 2025 began North America’s first commercial-scale production of cathode active material from recycled batteries, targeting 100 GWh/year, enough for a million EVs [6]. Umicore runs a 7,000-tonne battery recycling plant in Europe and is scaling toward a 150,000-tonne facility using patented pyro-hydrometallurgical recovery [6]. This is not a niche activity anymore; it’s becoming a parallel supply chain to mining itself.
Why it matters more than it sounds like it should
Urban mining isn’t just a curiosity: it’s climate maths. Recovering metal from waste generates up to 80% lower CO2 emissions than digging it out of the ground [2], because you skip the overburden removal, ore crushing, and low-grade beneficiation that make primary mining so energy-intensive. The IEA estimates that scaled recycling could cut the need for new mining by 5-30% by 2040, with the recycled critical-minerals market reaching roughly $200 billion by 2050 [1].
This post has been built based on the support of and sponsorship from: illumion, Custom Power, Quarto Technical Services, Eatron Technologies and About:Energy
None of this makes primary mining obsolete. Battery demand is growing faster than the recyclable stockpile can currently supply. But it does mean the “mine of the future” is, quite literally, already built. It’s sitting in a drawer, a skip, or a decommissioned battery pack, waiting for someone to notice it’s richer than the ground ever was.
References
- IISS / Foresight, Japan’s ‘urban mining’ and economic security — analysis
- Money Talks News / Metalorix / UN Global E-Waste Monitor 2024 — gold-per-tonne comparison
- UN Global E-Waste Monitor 2024 — cited via DevelopmentAid, “The invisible fortune”
- Tokyo 2020 Medal Project — Sepro Systems, Waste Today
- Fastmarkets, H1 2026 Battery Raw Materials / Black Mass pricing — market update
- Redwood Materials and Umicore public data, via Trendy Tech Tribe and Umicore battery recycling
See also: 4R’s — Repair, Reman, Repurpose, Recycle, Recycle and Second Life of Batteries for Electric Vehicles