There is gold in PC chips

There’s gold, silver, copper and several other precious metals inside the chip components that make the cell phones, computers and other electronic devices to work. They’re introduced during the manufacturing phase to connect circuits, complete wiring, etc. They’re present in very small quantities, but if you take many hundreds of recycled cell phones and melt them down you’d come away with a fairly large quantity of gold, a larger quantity of silver, and even still larger quantity of copper, though in terms of value it would be the other way around.

Basically the phones are put into a vat, heated up and, at different temperatures, various metals are extracted. Other materials are burned off, in what I’m sure is an EPA-friendly operation. The return on operations is even greater than real gold mines! According to Yokohama Metal Company Limited (a recycling firm), a gold mine yields 1/5th ounce of gold for every ton of ore processed. With cell phones, 5.3 ounces of gold are yielded for every ton of cell phones processed, as well as 6.6 lbs of silver and 220 lbs of copper. At todays prices, that would be approximately $5,500 for the gold, $1,700 for silver and $870 for copper.

For every ton of discarded cell phones, the return on investment is $8,070 less the costs of processing, which are probably around 70%, meaning about $2,400 per ton, or $1.21/lb. Not bad at all.