TECH

How many grams of gold can be extracted from a smartphone?

Gold is used not only in the jewelry industry, but also in electronic products - in printed circuit boards. It might seem like mining gold from used cell phones is not a bad idea for a startup.

This was decided by a Weibo user under the alias of Chef Alchemist, who bought 210 smartphone PCBs for $1.50 each. In the gold extraction process, it is necessary to carry out various chemical and physical processes (purification, dissolution, filtration, etc.) using acid and other materials. As a result, he managed to extract only 0.41 g of gold from these tablets. In the local market, this is no more than 30 dollars.

That is, the cost of just purchasing printed circuit boards turned out to be 10 times the cost of the gold received. It's also worth considering the cost of tools and chemicals.

Mydrivers notes that if the processing scale is large enough and the process is put on the conveyor, extracting gold from cell phone circuits makes sense. According to data published by Mydrivers, 16 tons of copper, 350 kg of silver, 34 kg of gold and 15 kg of palladium can be obtained from 1 million cell phones.

However, the gold mining process is very polluting, and several chemicals also have a negative impact on workers' health. Therefore, these productions are being phased out or banned in China.

mundophone