Mine Your Cellphone for Gold and Silver Before Throwing It Away

Retired consumer electronics appliances could bring you a fortune, even before recycling, if you decided to mine them for precious metals. The new trend is as scientific as possible, and even got a name: "Urban mining". The idea behind it is the fact that scrap parts hold significant amounts of gold, silver, copper, or precious gems such as iridium.

We have previously reported about a man who ended up poisoned to death with mercury in an attempt at mining his PC hardware, and one aspect should be clear before proceeding: such things are to be done in industrial, well-controlled environments and only by qualified personnel.

Urban mining can bring significant profits, as precious metals are getting more and more expensive. Even the common rough materials, such as copper, are well priced, not to mention the re-usable plastics. Gold is used on a large scale in manufacturing computer hardware and mobile phones, as it has higher conductive properties than copper or silver.

"It can be precious or minor metals, we want to recycle whatever we can", said Tadahiko Sekigawa, president of Eco-System Recycling Co, owned by Dowa Holdings.

According to Sekigawa, a ton of ore extracted from a conventional mine produces about 5 grams of gold, while a ton of scrap mobile phones would account for about 150 grams. The same amount of waste cell phones could also bring 100 kilograms of copper and about 3 kilograms of silver, that can be melted, then sold as ingots to jewelers.

Japan is one of the countries that take recycling seriously. Since the country has extremely limited natural resources, and a blooming electronics industry, most of the rough materials used in new products are extracted from the previous generations of consumer electronics devices.

"To some it's just a mountain of garbage, but for others it's a gold mine", said Nozomu Yamanaka, manager of the Eco-Systems recycling plant, one of the biggest facilities of its kind in Japan.