The research group Cascade Use is strongly focussing on materials related to the anthropogenic stock. Urban Mining includes the total material stock captured in various commodities. This enables to forecast available material flows in the future BEFORE they become waste.

Ideally, the circular economy achieves closed-loop recycling to avoid waste flows. CCU has published their approach on cascade use in the recently published paper: Cascade Use and the Management of Product Lifecycles (Authors: Matthias Kalverkamp, Alexandra Pehlken, Thorsten Wuest) and was selected as cover story from the mdpi publisher (out of 176 submitted articles). www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/9/1540

Waste flows could be minimised and nearly avoided if there is more knowledge available on qualitative and quantitative data of products and material flows. All involved stakeholders can manage their supply chain accordingly to the available resources if they know the time and composition of materials in products. The German Federal Environment Agency has published a broschure on “Urban Ming” in German and shows similar approaches as the research approach of CCU.

The brochure can be downloaded on the website of the Federal Agency and is available for free download:

www.umweltbundesamt.de/publikationen/urban-mining-ressourcenschonung-im-anthropozaen

CCU has published own publications related to the topic of Urban Mining. Selected topics are:

• Our broschure in English explains our work at CCU and introduces the CCU team
• Challenges in automotive fuel cells recycling with a focus on Platinum (Authors: Rikka Wittstock, Alexandra Pehlken)
• Is there a resource constraint related to lithium ion batteries in cars? (Authors: Alexandra Pehlken, Sabine Albach, Thomas Vogt)
• only in German: Rotorblätter aus Windkraftanlagen (Authors: Alexandra Pehlken, Henning Albers, Frauke Germer)

The research topic scrap tires has a long history in CCU and therefore we dedicated an own chapter scrap tires to it .

For further studies we recommend to visit the following websites:

• Urban Mining - Die Stadt als ewige Rohstoffquelle, Documentation (45min) on the topic Urban Mining of 3SAT (in German)
• Urban Mining - Facts und Figures, Fact und Figures related to urban mining from our neighbour country Austria
• World Ressource Forum for many information and meetings around resources
• The International Resource Panel by the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment) who build and share the knowledge needed to improve our use of resources worldwide