You might not be aware of it, but one of the reasons why your smartphone is so expensive is that it is made of expensive material and one of these materials is gold. When people list sources of scrap gold they often forget about cellphones. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the amount of gold used in smartphone is not that much. Even scrap gold dealers don’t expect people to walk in with gold scrapped from their smartphones. Gold buyers Brisbane are used to people bringing in their old, unused or damaged jewellery and coins. However, the use of gold is smartphones has been brought into the spotlight. In 2014, the BBC ran a story about gold in smartphones.They revealed that 40 smartphones when stripped could yield a gram of pure gold. This might not sound like a lot but when you consider that over 1.4 billion smartphones are sold world wide, and millions get trashed, that is a lot of gold.
Gold is a finite material; there is only so much of it that can be mined. This precious metal is always in demand because of its unique properties. Unfortunately, it cannot be manufactured and in some cases, it cannot be substituted. The gold recycling sector is important.
When the announcement was made that the next Olympic Games will be held in Japan in 2020, the organizing committee brought the topic of gold in cellphones to light by announcing that the Tokyo 2020Olympic medals would be made from recycled smartphones. The public handed in their smartphones and electronic devices from April 2017 to March 2019.
More than 6.21 million smartphones were collected and from these 32kg of gold was extracted. In addition to that 3,500kg of silver and 2,200kg of bronze were extracted to make 5,000 medals for the Olympics.
The innovative campaign by the Japanese government not only brought the subject of saving the environment to the fore and the value of recycling e-waste.
The Japanese showed how much gold is in everyday items that we take for granted. In a perfect world, we would not have to keep stripping the earth of its precious minerals and risking the lives of miners who have to go deep in the earth to dig the gold out. It is estimates that the amount of gold that has already been mined is somewherearound 197,576 tons. This is roughly 77% of the global recoverable gold reserves. This means we have less than 30% of the world’s gold reserve left to mine.
But because gold is indestructible, most of this gold is recyclable making scrap gold buyers Brisbane and everywhere else in the world an important part of the gold industry.
Why not scale down on mining and recycle all the gold we already have. If we relied on recycled gold alone, we would run out of gold in less than a month.
