Getting rid of unnecessary trash in an apartment or house, many often throw out and outdated, faulty equipment. However, they do not suspect that they not only violate the rules for the disposal of certain types of equipment, but also literally throw gold, platinum, silver and other precious metals in the trash.
This article will discuss how much precious metals can be contained in an ordinary smartphone, as well as what can be done with it.
What kind of drag metals are there in a smartphone?
According to some studies, the "stuffing" of many modern technology may include such elements as:
- Platinum
- Gold
- Silver
- Palladium
- Lithium
- Gadolinium
- Niobium
- Gallium
- Terbium
Reference! If we talk about a material called lithium, it is mainly extracted from batteries, which practically every smartphone is equipped with today.
Although lithium is not a precious metal, it is still quite valuable, and at specialized enterprises it is often it that extracts its batteries from spent batteries.
In the printed circuit boards of most modern phones, tablets and laptops today you can find only a small amount of gold. With silver, although it is much cheaper than the precious “aurum”, the situation is different: it is used in the production of boards in much larger quantities, so its mining from the boards is quite justified.
As for the extraction of lithium and other rare-earth materials from spent batteries, it also justifies itself exclusively on an industrial scale.
How many drag metals in a smartphone?
Statistics say that to extract one gram of gold, 35 to 40 smartphones must be processed. Anyone who is not too lazy to carry out simple calculations, will understand that one phone contains approximately 0.025 grams of precious material. In terms of rubles, it turns out that getting rich from a pair of old smartphones will not succeed in getting rich.
However, the extraction of gold and other valuable materials from spent equipment becomes quite profitable if you put it "on stream" on the basis of industrial enterprises. Many modern enterprises for the recycling of recycled equipment from one ton of printed circuit boards receive about 150 grams of gold, which is already a considerable figure, and allows the enterprise to get a “plus” in this way.
Reference! As already mentioned, silver in modern phones is much more than gold. On average, one company can produce no less than one and a half kilograms of pure silver from a ton of technical scrap.
What can be done?
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to get all the precious and rare-earth materials out of the out-of-service phone, which is profitable for itself. The fact is that to extract all the necessary substances will require complex chemical procedures, as well as reagents (for example, aggressive acids). Any attempt to “privately” extract precious metals even from a large batch of broken machinery will not pay for itself, not to mention the fact that most of the reagents for the necessary procedures cannot be bought in the neighboring market.
Reference! There is an opinion among amateur chemists that a large amount of gold also contains SIM cards for old or modern phones. It is alleged that with one "SIM" you can get up to half a gram of gold.
The extraction of these materials becomes profitable only in cases where the extraction of precious metals is put on stream, and the momentum becomes really large. The profitability of mining, among other things, also depends on the current price of gold and other materials on the world market, so many processing companies, seeking to make a substantial profit from mining, carefully monitor the price indicators for extracted substances on the exchange.
Those brave souls who possess the necessary knowledge in the field of chemistry and dare to independently extract precious metals from used phones, when they try to sell materials extracted in this way, very quickly learn about the existence of a law on the illicit trafficking of precious metals, and stop their illegal activities.
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