Every smartphone contains precious metals including gold, silver, copper, platinum and palladium.Smartphones are pocket-sized vaults of precious metals and rare earths. A typical iPhone is estimated to house around 0.034g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and less than one-thousandth of a gram of platinum. It also contains the less valuable but still significant aluminium (25g) and copper (around 15g).
In case you’re thinking of trying a little electronic gold mining at the individual scale, the miniscule amounts in each smartphone should make you think twice. But once you start thinking at the big scale, it looks a lot more attractive: one million mobile phones could deliver nearly 16 tonnes of copper, 350kg of silver, 34kg of gold and 15kg of palladium.
The challenge is how to recover those minerals and materials safely and economically. A significant proportion of e-waste – including mobile phones – gets exported or dumped in countries such as China where poorly paid workers and children are reported to be used to break apart these electronics, often using dangerous chemicals to get to the valuable components.
One town in south-eastern China called Guiyu has claimed the dubious distinction of being the largest e-waste site in the world. It’s causing terrible health problems for its residents and polluting the soil, rivers and air with mercury, arsenic, chromium and lead.
Even e-waste that is recycled in its country of origin poses a challenge. In Australia, for example, recycling of e-waste still involves industrial smelting which is high cost and far from environmentally-benign.
