Extracting Gold from Old Electronics

How To Mine Gold From Electronics | World Wide Waste
Business Insider

Gold! My mouth salivates at the prospect of getting my hands on some, especially if I can get it for free from old junk. Of course it's not so simple.

Trying to make a living by extracting useful materials from electronic waste is an iffy proposition, if you are just looking at the financial aspect. The 150 grams of gold they are extracting every week using their pilot project is worth about $9,000 (at today's price of $57.58 per gram), which might be enough to pay the bills. Whether it could scale up to make an industrial scale version a viable business is still an open question.

They mention a couple of points that could impact the business:

1. Gold is becoming more difficult to extract from the ground, which should make this bio-recycling more attractive, and
2. Electronics manufacturers are looking for ways to use less gold, which is will make this project less attractive.

They also talk about how recycling methods in third world shit-holes use polluting techniques that are unhealthy for the workers. But these people depend on this wretched business to make a living. Maybe we need to find a way to make those third world shit-holes less shitty. Yeah, good luck with that.

I hate to say it, but maybe we need a disposal tax on all electronics, shoot, for that matter, maybe we need such a tax on all manufactured items. Wouldn't Waste Management, AKA the Mafia, love to get their hands on that kind of revenue stream? You might think it would be a bad idea to let a corrupt organization like the Mafia into a legitimate business, but are they any worse than the jackholes running the highest levels of our federal government?

Jim Puckett (the guy they show in the old, fuzzy video clips) is an Executive Director and Founder of Basel Action Network and has been an environmental health and justice advocate for 28 years.

Mint Innovation (the outfit running this pilot program) has a website.