Mobile Phone Gold Rush

Hundreds of IC chips hidden in a mobile phone contain a minuscule amount of gold in their plastic package, in the shape of internal bonding wires. This gold can be extracted quite easily (well, compared to the traditional gold mines where thousands of emanciated mine slaves toiled), and is much appreciated by the mobile shop folks as a windfall. The only problem is to collect enough discarded mobile phones.

Yield from gold mines is pretty flimsy. The best gold mines, generally hydrothermal deposit mines, give around 50 to 80g of gold from 1 ton of ore. If you declared you had extracted 200 to 300g of pure gold from a ton of ore, everybody would call you a megalomaniac Munchausen. This miracle occurs daily, though, in the junkyard where all those discarded mobile phones are piled up. Continue>>