No wonder I always hear people in the community recycling old mobile phones at a “high price”

Recently, I often hear that people in the community are recycling old mobile phones at "high prices". Is there really some unspeakable secret in this?

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After careful research, the editor made a new discovery: scrapped mobile phones are not garbage, but a great treasure.

Let me tell you slowly~

A foreign research team conducted an experiment: they crushed an iPhone 4S in a blender and divided it into several culture dishes, mixed it with sodium peroxide at a high temperature of 500°C, and analyzed the resulting acidic solution to come to a surprising conclusion:

An iPhone 4S contains 33 grams of base metals such as iron (Fe), 17 grams of chromium (Cr, pronounced gè), and 6 grams of copper (Cu), as well as small amounts of precious metals, including 90 milligrams of silver (Ag) and 36 milligrams of gold (Au).

Not only that, the phone’s vibration motor, microphone, and speaker also use magnetic neodymium, the camera uses lanthanum (La, pronounced lán), and a series of other rare earth elements, such as yttrium (Y, pronounced yǐ), terbium (Tb, pronounced tè), gadolinium (Gd, pronounced gá), and praseodymium (Pr, pronounced pǔ).

Although a mobile phone contains a small amount of precious metals and rare earth elements, the concentration is not low at all. The gold content is as high as 69%, which is more than that of large high-quality gold mines.

The "Report on Electronic Waste" released by the United Nations shows that 1 to 4 grams of gold can be extracted from 1,000 kilograms of ore, and only 41 old mobile phones are needed to extract the same weight of gold.

More importantly, the cost of refining used mobile phones is nearly 3 times lower than the cost of mining gold!

Have you ever thought that an old discarded mobile phone can be so valuable?

Speaking of this, the editor can't help but feel distressed. Several old mobile phones at home have been replaced with stainless steel basins. It feels like a loss of 100 million!

At the same time, I have another bold idea:

If we collect all the old mobile phones in the world, we can extract gold and silver. Wouldn't it be easy to own a mountain of gold and silver?!

However, this beautiful dream was awakened before it even began.

In fact, major e-commerce platforms and mobile phone manufacturers have already launched recycling channels for used mobile phones.

At the iPhone recycling factory in Austin, USA, Apple has specially developed a robot that uses 29 mechanical arms to disassemble discarded iPhones.

According to official data, for every 10,000 iPhones disassembled by this robot, 190 kg of aluminum, 80 kg of copper, 0.13 kg of gold, 0.04 kg of platinum (Pt, pronounced bó) group metals, 0.07 kg of silver, 5.5 kg of tin (Sn) and 2.4 kg of rare earth elements can be recycled.

Due to the scale of channels and the dispersion of brands, the recycling efficiency of these e-commerce companies and manufacturers is not very high.

The best recycling results for used mobile phones are in the major Olympic Games. For example, about 30% of the silver and bronze in the medals of the Rio Olympics came from recycled materials.

All the medals for the Tokyo Olympics come from 31 kilograms of pure gold, 3,500 kilograms of pure silver and 2,200 kilograms of pure copper extracted from recycled small appliances and old mobile phones.

Although the idea of ​​recycling mobile phones to extract gold and silver is a good one, the process of extracting these precious metals from electronic components is actually very cumbersome, and if you are not careful during the extraction process, a lot of waste will be generated, causing environmental and ecological problems.

Even without considering these, from a cost perspective alone, extracting gold and silver from discarded mobile phones is a thankless and unprofitable business before reaching a certain scale.

It seems that it is impossible to dig up these mountains of gold and silver with one's own strength!

Is there really no solution?

In the new era of rapid technological development, I think one day we can gather the strength of the country to collect used mobile phones and household appliances across the country or the world; develop new refining technologies to reduce the impact on the ecological environment; and gather the gold, silver and rare earths in every old mobile phone into a sea, once again contributing to the country's development.

So, guys, do you have any better ideas?

Let’s open our minds and turn waste into treasure~