How much gold you can find inside smart phones and computers?

There is significant amount of gold in consumer electronics. It is on you to find it and start recycling process.

Mostly we picture copper when thinking about how electricity is conducted, probably because it is the most common conductor. Silver is actually the best conductor, followed closely by gold. Yes you read it right, Gold is better conductor than copper is. Copper is cheaper than precious metals, but it’s also much slower in transporting electrons than its glamorous siblings. In the world of computing and communications, speed is more important than cost, which means that copper remains relegated to construction and pennies.

And as fast a conductor as silver is, it corrodes or tarnishes easily whenever it comes in contact with water, even with humid air. Corrosion is one of the things we don’t want inside our electronic devices.

Gold, on the other hand, is highly corrosion-resistant. In short word explanation - Gold is not as fast as silver, but it doesn’t fall apart like silver and is many times faster than copper. It is a best choice in producing precise electronic devices.

To learn more about gold and how it is removed from discarded devices, we are going to write a few words about using Gold in electronics and how to recycle those for getting it back

How much gold is in a smart phone? In very rough numbers, there are 10 troy ounces of gold, or about three-fifths of a pound, per ton of smart phones. Ten thousand phones weigh one ton. With gold selling for about $1,580 per ounce, that would yield $15,800.

How much gold we can find in laptop? Two hundred laptops would yield five troy ounces of gold. How much is in an average desktop? A PC circuit board, where the gold is, weighs about a pound. If you had a ton of those boards, you should have 5 troy ounces of gold. Are there manufacturers that use more gold than others? Computer makers don’t make their circuit boards because they are commodity items. They buy them from third parties. The trend in using gold among all of those companies is definitely down. It’s a costly material, so they are looking for more efficient ways to make the boards, trying to use as little gold as possible.

How long does it take to get all the gold out? Individuals can take apart a smart phone easily by hand, but the volume of gold is going to be small. It’s not uncommon for a developing nation to accept all kinds of trash from developed nations, including electronics, in return for cash. Local entrepreneurs typically burn circuit boards and use cyanide on the ash to separate the gold. That’s not what anyone would call a green process, but it is a cottage industry because it gets the job done reasonably inexpensively. Some companies are using a mechanical process, shredding computer components to quarter-inch bits to liberate the plastic, aluminum, steel, gold and other materials to create commodity streams. Magnets grab the steel. Eddy currents are used to propel non-ferrous metals, including precious metals, from plastics.

Is shredding computers the best way to get at the gold? There are lots of interesting ideas for technologies that could possibly be better, but it’s hard to compete against developing nations that are manually breaking things down, often in environmentally unfriendly ways. Doing it almost any other way to protect the environment is going to be more expensive.