How many precious metals are in your smartphone

When getting rid of unnecessary junk in an apartment or house, many often throw out outdated, faulty equipment. At the same time, they do not suspect that they are not only violating the rules for recycling certain types of equipment, but also literally throwing gold, platinum, silver and other precious metals into the trash.
This article will talk about how much precious metals can be contained in an ordinary smartphone, as well as what can be done with it.

What precious metals are in your smartphone?

According to some studies, the “stuffing” of many modern equipment may include such elements as:

• Platinum
• Gold
• Silver
• Palladium
• Lithium
• Gadolinium
• Niobium
• Gallium
• Terbium

Reference! If we talk about the material called lithium, it is mainly extracted from rechargeable batteries, which are equipped with virtually every smartphone today.

Lithium, although not a precious metal, is still quite valuable, and at specialized enterprises it is often extracted from used batteries.

Only small amounts of gold can be found in the circuit boards of most modern phones, tablets and laptops today. With silver, although it is much cheaper than precious “aurum”, the situation is different: it is used in the production of circuit boards in much larger quantities, so its extraction from circuit boards is completely justified.

As for the extraction of lithium and other rare earth materials from used batteries, it justifies itself exclusively on an industrial scale.

How many precious metals are in a smartphone?

Statistics say that to extract one gram of gold, it is necessary to process from 35 to 40 smartphones. Anyone who takes the time to carry out simple calculations will understand that one phone contains approximately 0.025 grams of precious material. Converted to rubles, it turns out that you won’t be able to get rich by mining gold from a couple of old smartphones.

However, the extraction of gold and other valuable materials from used equipment becomes quite profitable if it is put on stream at industrial enterprises. Many modern enterprises for processing recycled equipment receive about 150 grams of gold from one ton of printed circuit boards, which is already a considerable figure, and thus allows the enterprise to gain profit.

Reference! As already mentioned, there is much more silver in modern phones than gold. On average, one enterprise can extract no less than one and a half kilograms of pure silver from a ton of technical scrap.

What can be done?

Unfortunately, it is still out of the question to profitably extract all the precious and rare earth materials from a phone that has exhausted its service life. The fact is that to extract all the necessary substances, complex chemical procedures will be required, as well as reagents (for example, aggressive acids). Any attempts at “private” extraction of precious metals, even from a large batch of broken equipment, will not pay for themselves, not to mention the fact that most of the reagents for the necessary procedures cannot be purchased on the neighboring market.

Reference! There is an opinion among amateur chemists that SIM cards for old or modern phones also contain large amounts of gold. It is claimed that you can get up to half a gram of gold from one SIM card.

The extraction of these materials becomes profitable only in cases where the extraction of precious metals is put on stream, and the turnover becomes really high. The profitability of mining, among other things, also depends on the current price of gold and other materials on the world market, so many processing companies, trying to get significant profits from mining, carefully monitor the price indicators for the mined substances on the stock exchange.

Those brave souls who have the necessary knowledge in the field of chemistry and dare to independently extract precious metals from used phones, when trying to sell the materials obtained in this way, very quickly learn about the existence of a law on the illegal trafficking of precious metals, and stop their illegal activities.