Suwon City Pushing Forward with 'Urban Mining Resource Circulation Center'

Suwon City is pursuing the creation of an 'urban mining' project within the region for the first time under local government leadership.

Urban mining involves extracting valuable metals from discarded electrical and electronic products, with the aim of recycling waste materials and enabling resource circulation.

According to Suwon City on the 12th, the city is currently pushing forward with establishing a tentatively named Urban Mining Resource Circulation Center that will extract and utilize valuable metals from discarded electrical and electronic products such as mobile phones to overcome resource crises.

To this end, the city reflected such content in the Suwon City Waste Disposal Basic Plan formulated at the beginning of this year with a 10-year outlook, and conducted internal reviews regarding operational methods.

However, the city believes that implementation this year will be difficult given that massive project costs, manpower, systems, and technological capabilities must be in place to establish the center.

Accordingly, the city plans to finalize the promotion plan once the research results from the Suwon Development Research Center's study on urban mining activation methods, which will be conducted throughout the year, are completed.

Earlier, the Suwon Development Research Center proposed the creation of an urban mining project to the city in early this year to regenerate discarded waste resources and launched full-scale research.

The center plans to conduct research this year on the status of waste discharge occurring in Suwon City and operational methods, and will propose related content to the city. Specific center scale and site considerations including accessibility are also included in the research scope.

A city official stated, "Once the Suwon Development Research Center completes its research by year-end, we plan to proceed with a feasibility study based on the proposed research results, and through procedures such as site selection and ordinance amendments, materialize the urban mining project."