Urban Mining and Recycling opened at Empa NEST
Prof. Dr. Werner Sobek, Government councillor of the Canton of Zurich Markus Kägi, NEST Innovation Manager Enrico Marchesi, Prof. Dirk E. Hebel and Felix Heisel (Photo Empa)
On February 8th 2018, Werner Sobek, Dirk E. Hebel and Felix Heisel officially opened Urban Mining and Recycling UMAR, the newest addition to the Empa NEST. The project is underpinned by the proposition that all the resources required to construct a building must be fully reusable, recyclable or compostable. This places life-cycle thinking at the forefront of the design: Instead of merely using and subsequently disposing of resources, they are borrowed from their technical and biological cycles for a certain amount of time before being put back into circulation once again. Such an approach makes reusing and repurposing materials just as important as recycling and upcycling them (both at a systemic and a molecular/biological level, e.g. via melting or composting). This conceptual emphasis means that UMAR functions simultaneously as a material laboratory and a temporary material storage.
Felix Heisel, Empa CEO Prof. Dr. Gian-Luca Bona and Prof. Dirk E. Hebel (Photo Empa)
Visitors were very interested in the materials used in UMAR, in this case the mycelium wall insulation MycoFoam (Photo Empa)
