You might be aware that many electronic devices contain gold and other precious metals. But how much? U.S. consumers throw away up to $60 million USD in gold and silver via discarded cell phones each year.
Currently, only 12.5 percent of e-waste is recycled into other products. As a result, it’s estimated that Americans throw away $60 million in gold and silver every year through unwanted phones alone.
Because recycling rates for e-waste are still low (globally below 15%), a lot of these precious metals exit the economy. In the U.S. alone, consumers trash $60 million USD in gold and silver each year by not recycling their phones.
Gold is usually mined from open pit mines, where miners blast rocks with dynamite, drill, crush the ore, and use chemicals to strip out tiny amounts of gold. However, the quantity of gold extracted from mines can be compared to the amount of precious metal contained in computer electronics.
The amount of gold used in individual components of electronic devices is relatively small. However, considering how many devices (computers, cell phones) are produced each year, this make a considerable quantity. Moreover, electronic components also include other precious metals such as platinum or palladium.
In January 2018, Dell became the first manufacturer to use recycled gold from e-waste into its products. It considered that now, Dell uses on average 7000£ pound worth of gold each year in its products. Darrel Ward, senior vice president of commercial client solutions at DELL explain.
“There is 800 more times gold in one ton of motherboards than there is in one ton of ore mined from the earth.”
According to a Trucost study, the gold reclamation process created by Dell environmental partner Wistron GreenTech has a 99 percent lower environmental impact than traditionally mined gold.
"If we don’t start this now and we don’t start taking these precious metals out of the landfills and putting them back into the ecosystem, then we’ve all failed”
As part of Dell’s Legacy of Good Program, the company is supposed to recycle 100 million pounds of recycled content into its product portfolio by 2020. The collaboration with Nikki Reed extends from the company’s widespread efforts to find innovative ways to create value from waste.
The Dell program consists of a partnership with Wistron, to extract gold from motherboards. They use a responsible solution, using electro-chemistry to extract the gold and then melt it into bars for easy transport. According to their website, it is estimated that they ship around 2.27 kilos of gold to their suppliers to create a “gold salt bath”, where components for new motherboards are dipped into it to coat them with plated gold.
