A New International Project Aims to Track U.S. Electronic Waste for Recycling

Looking for a source of rare earths? Try your stash of old cellphones

By Clay Dillow Posted 05.03.2011 at 2:23 pm 5 Comments

Our Wired World, Disposed Of Curtis Palmer via Wikimedia

With rare earth supplies uncertain and gold and silver prices spiking, a new international project wants to mine a potentially huge untapped source of minerals and metals: that dresser drawer where you’re hoarding all your old cell phones.

Electronic waste is not a new problem. It’s estimated that only 10-15 percent of personal electronics--cellphones, computers, televisions, etc.--are properly recycled. Many are shipped abroad for “recycling” (where health and environmental laws are lax), but even among those many of the components, some of which are toxic, become landfill. The rest end up in dumps here in the U.S., or in that aforementioned dresser drawer where your Nokia 1600 still resides, just in case you need it someday (you won’t).

The project, funded with $2.5 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and working with international partners, aims to help track U.S. electronic waste as it flows around the world in an effort to devise solutions and enhance recycling efforts. With help from port officials in West Africa and Asia, the project hopes to determine just how these discarded goods are moving, and what can be done to ensure they are properly recycled.

The idea isn’t just to keep toxic materials out of landfills--though that’s certainly a primary objective. One million cellphones reportedly can yield 53 pounds of gold, a commodity that topped $1,500 per ounce (per ounce!) recently. Also spiking in price recently: silver, of which 550 pounds can be extracted from the same one million phones. Add nearly ten tons of copper and a smattering of smaller quantities of valuable rare earth elements, and it’s not difficult to make economic sense of such an endeavor.

[Reuters]

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5 Comments

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ThisNameTaken

05/03/11 at 2:59 pm

"With rare earth supplies uncertain and gold and silver prices spiking, a new international project wants to mine a potentially huge untapped source of minerals and metals: that dresser drawer where you’re hoarding all your old cell phones."

Read as: "For an untapped source of income, disassemble and salvage the gold/silver/rare earths BEFORE throwing out your device."

Good to know. I paid for those rare earths thank you; I should get the money for them not some bureaucratic agency.

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Saint020

05/03/11 at 3:33 pm

I have been talking about this for years now. With all this talk about China owning some 90 something percent of all the worlds’ rare earth element mines, why doesn’t the US set up some sort of electronics recycling service for communities?

- Darth Lithicus

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Llowelme

05/04/11 at 11:38 am

Thisnametaken- If you have the equipment and expertise to remove the materials and deal with the toxic chemicals go for it. With gold prices what they are you should have no problem finding a buyer for your .0000033125 ounce of gold per phone.

Zaint020 - I've actually seen more and more companies starting this in the past few years. There are some that will take all electronic waste for free now. So hopefully soon even if we still go about our same recycling framework as today we may get something similar to a core deposit back. Wishful dreaming I suppose though.

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rosen380

05/04/11 at 12:17 pm

"what they are you should have no problem finding a buyer for your .0000033125 ounce of gold per phone."

Not that it makes alot of difference, but I came up with .000848 ounces per phone-- or about $1.27 worth.

"I've actually seen more and more companies starting this in the past few years. There are some that will take all electronic waste for free now."

Best Buy, near me, will take virtually anything I can find to give them... Hard drives, cd-rom, monitors, printers, whole computers or components, cables, etc. I bring in a bunch of boxes of broken junk and they just say please call first if it is going to be more than a pallets worth :)

I suspect the bulk stuff is actually re-sell-able for about $1.50-$2.00 per pound; if you already have a fleet of trucks and what-not to deliver it, it makes that easier. If you have a fleet of trucks already going to the location where consumers are dropping the stuff off, and those trucks are usually leaving empty anyways, might as well reload it and drop the stuff off at the most convenient place that will buy it from them...

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drchuck1

05/06/11 at 12:09 pm

@thisnametaken, stop f#cking trolling