Did you know: recycling electronic waste can benefit more than ... gold digging

Giving gold or extracting copper ore can help you find 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 according to the classic method.

Gathering metal from electronic devices has gone far more than we collect from the classic method.

If you're reading this article, you're part of a big problem with our planet: electronic waste . Your smartphone after a period of use will slow down, or you can't resist the sweetness of mesmerizing smartphone ads and decide it's time to upgrade. You will probably forget every minute you have spent with your old device as soon as you get a shiny new device on hand. But our planet is not so easy to forget.

According to Futurism, in 2016 alone, the world has thrown away 44.7 million tons of electronics that were no longer usable or simply no longer needed. The combined number of phones, laptops, microwaves and TVs can form a tower 4,500 times larger than the Eiffel Tower, but only 20% of them are properly recycled. The rest are burned, pollutants are released into the atmosphere, or buried in the ground somewhere and leak toxic chemicals into the ground and water sources.

An electronic landfill in China.

It can be seen that merely disposing of electronic devices is a harmful behavior to the environment, but this fact is not clear enough for everyone to stop together. Another fact, ironically, can change this behavior, is that those e-waste dumps can be a gold mine if you know how to exploit it.

Of course, we all know that electronic devices contain many valuable metals, besides glass and plastic materials. A smartphone may not contain many precious metals, but consumers buy up to 1.7 billion devices each year, and just 1 million of them will help you earn nearly 35kg of gold, 15.6 tons of copper, and 350kg of silver.

It sounds "good", but so far, no one is sure about the economics of e-waste digging like that. To clarify this issue, the trio of researchers from Tsinghua University (Beijing) and Macquarie University (Sydney) conducted a study and published the results in the Journal of Technology and Environmental Science.

How much gold in electronic devices?

First, they collected data from 8 recycling companies in China. They continue to calculate all the costs associated with gold and copper extraction from waste, including steps from collecting electronic waste to the cost of equipment and facilities needed to recycle them. .

After obtaining such data, they take into account government subsidies and the amount of money companies can earn from selling a variety of components. Finally, the researchers compared the total cost of "urban mining" with traditional ore mining, and concluded that traditional ore mining costs 13 times higher!

Of course, not all countries are subsidized by the government like China, and e-waste recycling costs are not the same. However, China is the largest source of e-waste in the world, so if companies in this country realize that they can benefit from the extraction of metal from waste, it will certainly creating impact is not small.

There may be more companies from China to participate in the "urban mining" market in the future. And perhaps many companies in other countries will also start participating in this field. Or perhaps, you should think carefully about what you should do with old smartphones once you have purchased a new device!