When Mats Eklund goes metal prospecting he takes his life in his hands. But it's not raging torrents or grizzly bears he has to worry about. His main concerns are crumbling warehouses and frenzied rush-hour traffic. An environmental engineer at Linkoeping University in Sweden, Eklund is one of a new breed of prospectors who prefer to head downtown rather than out into the wild. Their target is "urban ore" - forgotten supplies of metals that lie in and under the city streets. Eklund has spent several years tracing abandoned cabling and long-lost pipework beneath roads and pavements. His fieldwork suggests that many cities contain precious seams of valuable metals locked up in discarded subterranean infrastructure.
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