Mining gold or extracting copper ore can earn you a fortune in the past. But a new study shows that collecting metals from discarded electronic devices – also known as “urban mining” – is much less expensive than collecting them in different ways. classic method.
Collecting metal from discarded electronics is much more than we collect from the classical method.
If you’re reading this, you’re part of a huge problem facing our planet: electronic waste . Your smartphone will slow down after a while, or you can’t resist the sweetness of the mesmerizing smartphone ads and decide it’s time to upgrade. You will probably forget every moment spent with the old device before as soon as you get your hands on a shiny new device. But our planet is not so easily forgotten.
According to Futurism, in 2016 alone, the world threw away 44.7 million tons of electronic devices that are no longer usable or simply no longer needed. This number of phones, laptops, microwaves and TVs combined can form a tower 4,500 times the size of the Eiffel Tower, but only 20% of it is recycled properly. The rest is burned, released pollutants into the atmosphere, or buried in the ground somewhere far away and leaked toxic chemicals into the ground and water sources.
An e-waste dump in China.
It can be seen that simply throwing away electronic devices is an act of harm to the environment, but this truth is not clear enough for everyone to stop together. Another fact that, ironically, can change this behavior, is that e-waste dumps can be a goldmine if they know how to mine them.
Of course, we all know electronic devices contain many valuable metals, besides glass and plastic materials. A smartphone may not contain a lot of precious metals, but consumers buy up to 1.7 billion devices a year, and just 1 million of them will earn you nearly 35kg of gold, 15.6 tons of copper, and 350kg of silver.
It sounds “bargain”, but so far, no one has been sure about the economics of digging up such e-waste. To clarify this issue, a trio of researchers from Tsinghua University (Beijing) and Macquarie University (Sydney) conducted a study and published the results in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
How much gold is in electronic devices?
First, they collected data from eight recycling companies in China. They go on to calculate all the costs associated with mining gold and copper from waste, including steps from collecting e-waste to the cost of the equipment and construction needed to recycle them. .
Having gathered enough of the above data, they factored in government subsidies and how much money companies could make from selling a variety of components. In the end, the researchers compared the total cost of “urban mining” with that of traditional ore mining, and concluded that traditional ore mining costs up to 13 times more!
Of course, not all countries are subsidized by the government like China, and the cost of recycling e-waste is not the same. However, China is the largest producer of e-waste in the world, so if companies in this country realize that they can profit from mining metals from waste, it will certainly be. make little impact.
It is possible that more companies from China will enter the “urban mining” market in the future. And perhaps more companies in other countries will also start to enter this field. Or perhaps, you should think hard about what you should do with your old smartphones once you’ve bought a new one!