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]