WEEE MARL!

Team Point of View

Contemporary mining categorizes certain materials as "specially relevant" due to the relation between resource shortage and high demand. Nowadays most of them are Rare Earth materials, the worldwide demand of which has vastly increased from 1,000 to 150,000 tons a year between 1953 and 2012.
China is currently the main producer with over 37% of the natural deposits and 97% of the global production. Most of the extraction companies are settled there. European countries are forced to import 100% of its Rare Earth needs, although part of the most important sectors in the current Occidental economy require high amounts of it for its production processes.
Europe, the US and Japan are the biggest Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) consumers worldwide. This process obviously generates an enormous amount of waste called WEEE - Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. WEEE will increase in the coming decades with an expected rate of a least 4% per year.
We propose to develop a WEEE-Treatment station in Marl, willing to become the leading initiative in Europe.

Jury Point of View

The project introduces a consistent solution, particularly for a reprogramming of the site: Coal mining is supposed to be succeeded by urban mining: an economic concept of recycling electronic devices and components. It not only provides realistic work perspectives for former miners, but also perspectives to transform Marl into a new hub of a modern closed-loop economy. The project is positively assessed as an innovative approach to the subsequent use of a former industrial site even if the spatial manifestation remains open and requires further processing.