Making money out of E-Waste

It is common to read about the amount of electronic wastes that are plaguing this world. Old computers, motherboards, outdated cellphones, music systems, compact discs etc are all categorised under e-waste and someone is yet to come up with a effective way to dispose of them. But now suddenly E-wastes seem to have become pricey commodities. According to a news report I read online in the Times of India there are experts who mine e-wastes for precious metals including gold, copper, silver among others.

Apparently this form of "Urban mining" is very popular in Japan. Astounding is the statistics that a tone of gold ore gives only 5 gms of pure gold but a ton of mobile phones would return nearly 150 gms of gold. Urban mining is indeed far more lucrative than real gold mining.

So next time you think of discarding your old mobile phone, think again. You may be throwing a cache of precious metals into garbage. I am pretty sure this industry will start thriving in other countries very soon and it should if we are to have any success in combating E-wastes that are plaguing our earth.