An integrated review of concepts and initiatives for mining the technosphere: towards a new taxonomy

Stocks of finite resources in the technosphere continue to grow due to human activity, at the expense of decreasing in-ground deposits. Human activity, in other words, is changing the prerequisites for mineral extraction. For that reason, mining will probably have to adapt accordingly, with more emphasis on the exploitation of previously extracted minerals.This study reviews the prevailing concepts for mining the technosphere as well as actual efforts to do so, the objectives for mining, the scale of the initiatives, and what makes them different from other reuse and recycling concepts. Prevailing concepts such as “urban mining,” however, are inadequate guides to the complexity of the technosphere, as these concepts are inconsistently defined and disorganized, often overlapping when it comes to which stocks they address. This review of these efforts and their potential is therefore organized around a new taxonomy based on the umbrella concept technospheric mining, defined as the extraction of technospheric stocks of minerals that have been excluded from ongoing anthropogenic material flows.An analysis on the basis of this taxonomy shows that the prevailing mining initiatives are generally scattered and often driven by environmental factors, in which metal recovery is viewed as an additional source of revenue. However, development of technology, specialized actors and new business models and policy instruments, could lead to technospheric mining operations becoming a profit-driven business.