You probably didn’t know it, but the next gold rush could be in your pocket. The smartphones we use contain precious metals and materials from so-called rare earths.
Among these metals are silver, nickel, tin, platinum, but also gold.
It is the special properties of gold that make it a metal of choice in the construction of our mobile electronic devices. Gold has the ability to be an excellent conductor, and moreover it corrodes only with great difficulty, in situations that the normal user of a smartphone will probably never encounter. In order to reduce costs, gold is used in an alloy, mainly on contact surfaces, on the SIM card and battery, but also inside the circuit of your phone.
This presence of gold is not negligible, especially since it is not the only precious element to constitute the smartphone.
Based on this observation, a chain of extraction of these metals is being set up in order to take advantage of this manna, while surfing on the wave of recycling and ecology… provided that this recovery of these elements is done under good conditions.
In Belgium, in Hoboken, a plant focuses on the reprocessing of this particular waste in order to extract its precious content. Three hundred employees are now working on the task of exploiting this vein, which makes it possible to collect one kilo of gold for 35,000
