What is Urban Mining?
The electronics industry is now competitive with both the religious world and the jeweler for gold. It takes only forty cell phones to use up one gram of the stuff. But, it takes a ton of mined ore to produce that gram.
“Urban mining” is the picking of valuable minerals and metals out of discarded electronics. Though recycling is only beginning to catch on in many places, a metric ton of recycled laptop circuit boards can yield 40 to 800 times as much gold as the ore.
For every 1 million cell phones that are recycled, the following amounts of precious metals can be recovered:
16,000 kg of copper
350 kg of silver
34 kg of gold
15 kg of palladium
Benedette Cuffari, “Extracting Gold from E-Waste” at AZO Cleantech (October 26 2017)
Currently, we use heat to burn out the metals, or chemicals to leach out the metals, both are effective but toxic. A company in America has developed a method using water with some additives, and electrolysis to separate valuable metals. It will be interesting if this process becomes public, urban miming might just take off... :-)
If anyone knows of any other methods, I'd love to hear about it in the comments section below. Have a great day :-)
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