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"Urban Mining" Finds Precious Metals in Discarded Electronics

Published: 18 June 2008
 by Staff
JAPAN - Before throwing out your old cell phone, maybe you should mine it for gold, silver, copper and other metals.

It’s called "urban mining," the scavenging of scrap metal in old electronic products for materials such as iridium and gold. The process is becoming a growth industry around the world as metal prices hit record highs.

According to industry reports, the recovered metals are resold to manufacturers to use in new electronics components, and the gold and other precious metals are also melted down and sold to jewelers and investors.

"It can be precious or minor metals, we want to recycle whatever we can," said Tadahiko Sekigawa, president of Eco-System Recycling in Japan.

In a study by Yokohama Metal, a recycling firm, a ton of discarded mobile phones can yield 150g of gold or more, while a ton of ore from a gold mine produces only 5g of gold on average. The same volume of discarded mobile phones also contains about 100kg of copper and 3kg of silver.

Recycling obsolete electronic products has become more lucrative as metal prices climb. Gold is currently trading at around $890 an ounce, and copper and tin are also near record highs, with silver prices well above historic averages.

The electronic recycling industry is growing in Japan, a country that has few natural resources to supply its billion-dollar electronics industry - it does, however, it does discard millions of cell phones and obsolete consumer electronics every year.

"To some it’s just a mountain of garbage, but for others it’s a gold mine," said Nozomu Yamanaka, manager of the Eco-Systems recycling plant where discarded cell phones and electronics are dismantled and recycled for their metal value.

Eco-System, established 20 years ago, typically produces from 200kg to 300kg of gold bars a month with a 99.99% purity, worth from $5.9 million to $8.8 million, which is comparable to the output of a small gold mine.
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