'Urban mining' is the practice of reclaiming valuable resources from the waste stream of cities and organizations.

All over the world, organizations big and small struggle with surplus inventory, including office equipment, furniture, and electronics that inevitably end up as waste. Thanks to laws and enlightened self-interest, more and more organizations try to tackle this problem by adopting the 'Four Rs': Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Recover. Adopting the 'Four Rs' can be challenging for organizations due to the administrative costs and overhead involved.

My startup is currently developing a smart container system, equipped with embedded Android devices, as part of a platform that automates the surplus inventory lifecycle. These containers track the contents added to them, and can adapt to different reuse, recycling, or recovery scenarios.

This talk will explore the technical challenges of building such an embedded system, including hardware selection, solar power integration, interfacing with sensors, edge-based machine learning, and cloud connectivity solutions.