Urban Mining

Did you know that in your pocket, on your desk and in your schoolbag, you have gold, silver, copper and many other precious metals? Inside every electronic device that you see, there are valuable materials. Nowadays, people throw away so many used electronic devices that it is actually easier and more profitable to take gold from electronics than traditional mines. 'Urban mining' is the recycling of electronics to take out the precious metals inside.

However, before you rip apart your mobile phone, let’s look at some information. The average mobile phone has about $7 worth of gold, a tablet has approximately $16 worth of gold and a laptop contains about $40–80 worth of gold. It would take about 35 mobile phones to make one gram of gold, and the process of extracting the gold is expensive, difficult and dangerous.

However, it is possible to extract these metals on an industrial scale. The Enviromental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that every day we throw away almost 500,000 mobile devices. The EPA says that by recycling 1,000,000 cell phones, 10,000kg of copper, 10kg of palladium, 250kg of silver and 23kg of gold can be recovered. The United Nations estimates that 50 million tonnes of e-waste is generated every year, so there are a lot of valuable metals that can be mined.

In one year, appproximately 320 tonnes of gold and over 7000 tonnes of silver are used for the manufacturing of computer parts. Of course, it is better to reuse electonic parts, but when they come to the end of their lives, it is good to know that a lot can be urban mined and recycled into the next generation of electronic devices.