Environmental Technology and Management Department of Management and Engineering Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping Linköping Studies in Science and Technology
Licentiate Thesis No. 1617, 2013 LIU-TEK-LIC-2013:51
Imagine grabbing Norrköping by the city hall’s tower and pulling the entire city up by its roots. Imagine shaking it. Imagine millions of cables and hundreds of thousands of pipes freeing themselves from the great hunks of rock and tons of musty and polluted dirt. Imagine an AC power system four times as long as the entire Motala Ström from Lake Vättern to the Baltic Sea.
Picture derelict pieces of the obsolete DC power system just beneath the crust of the sidewalk, a sweaty grid of district heating pipes 400 kilometres long, the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century old tramline rails and rusty old town gas lines that could be wrapped sixteen times around Norrköping’s inner city.
Finally, imagine the 5000 tonnes of metal that can be found in disconnected infrastructure spread out and hibernating underneath the city. Imagine that the hibernating copper alone is worth 28 million Swedish crowns and the environmental benefits that would come from the recycling of those wires in
comparison to traditional mining. Imagine urban mining.
U N D E RN EA TH N ORRKÖPIN G - AN U RB AN MIN E OF H IBE RNA TIN G INFRA S TR UCTU RE BJÖRN W ALLS TEN 20 13
U N D E R N E A T H
N O R R K Ö P I N G
AN URBAN MINE OF HIBERNATING INFRASTRUCTURE
B J Ö R N W A L L S T E N
Linköping Studies in Science and Technology Licentiate Thesis No. 1617, 2013
Environmental Technology and Management Department of Management and Engineering Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping Linköping Studies in Science and Technology
Licentiate Thesis No. 1617, 2013 LIU-TEK-LIC-2013:51
Imagine grabbing Norrköping by the city hall’s tower and pulling the entire city up by its roots. Imagine shaking it. Imagine millions of cables and hundreds of thousands of pipes freeing themselves from the great hunks of rock and tons of musty and polluted dirt. Imagine an AC power system four times as long as the entire Motala Ström from Lake Vättern to the Baltic Sea.
Picture derelict pieces of the obsolete DC power system just beneath the crust of the sidewalk, a sweaty grid of district heating pipes 400 kilometres long, the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century old tramline rails and rusty old town gas lines that could be wrapped sixteen times around Norrköping’s inner city.
Finally, imagine the 5000 tonnes of metal that can be found in disconnected infrastructure spread out and hibernating underneath the city. Imagine that the hibernating copper alone is worth 28 million Swedish crowns and the environmental benefits that would come from the recycling of those wires in
comparison to traditional mining. Imagine urban mining.
U N D E RN EA TH N ORRKÖPIN G - AN U RB AN MIN E OF H IBE RNA TIN G INFRA S TR UCTU RE BJÖRN W ALLS TEN 20 13
U N D E R N E A T H
N O R R K Ö P I N G
AN URBAN MINE OF HIBERNATING INFRASTRUCTURE
B J Ö R N W A L L S T E N
Linköping Studies in Science and Technology Licentiate Thesis No. 1617, 2013
