After recycling used false teeth for gold, the new trend in Japan is “Urban Mining”- or getting precious metals out of used gadgets and electronic products.

The high rise in the price of precious metals, such as gold and silver, makes this new habit quite profitable. The gold can be sold to jewelers and the other metals can be used for new electronic products.

If you get a ton of ore from a gold mine, you only get 5 grams (0.18 ounces) of pure gold. If you have a ton of used cell phones well you are rich. You can get up to 150 grams (5.3 ounce) of gold.

But it seems that only 10-20 percent of the cell phones ever reach recycling, causing the recycling companies to import used electronics from Singapore and Indonesia. Maybe it’s time to recycle some useless robots instead?

Source: [Yahoo News]

The annual Meiwa Electronics annual Stupid Robot Contest, is held every year and the competitors must obey the following rules: the robot must be mechanical, It must be completely useless and it must make people laugh. Loyal readers of Japanite knows already that this can be applied to a lot of Japanese inventions throughout the year, without even a contest.

One of the robots, Papa Robopucho (picture above) is playing flags game with himself and sometime just cries for help. another example is this one, that I hope is inventor knows what it’s doing:

Last year you could see maid robots inspired from maid cafes in Akihabara (inventors probably haven’t heard about the new mom cafes trend), and a child robot that did push-ups.

This is also from last year:

So, What robot will you suggest to the competition? Share with us in the comments.

More info and videos (japanese): [Robot Watch] and [Bacarobo]

and more on the contests in [Meiwa]