Abstract

Interest in urban mining has been growing in recent years, especially in waste from electric and electronic equipment (WEEE). The interest in WEEE is not only due to the concentration at which valuable key elements are found, but also the growing waste streams that are being generated by humankind. On the other hand, standard large-scale mining is facing new operating challenges because the number of elements of interest in ores is continuously decreasing. Being a very well-established industry, large-scale mining has vast know-how that can be transferred to urban mining. This chapter will present a comparative review of the stages that are similar to urban and large-scale mining (i.e., mining, pre-treatment and concentration, and chemical metallurgy), showing the advantages and disadvantages of chemical and physical processing routes for both urban and conventional mining. The most relevant findings in this chapter are (1) the importance of the size reduction and concentration processes to reduce the potentially hazardous waste produced in the recovery of elements, and (2) the lack of foresight that conventional mining has had with its operating problems when the quality of the raw materials decreased. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.