Tuesday June 26, 2007

Digital waste worth more than gold, copper ore

hardware.slashdot.org -> foreignpolicy.com :

"Imagine sheer mountains of discarded Pentium IIIs, tractor trailers overflowing with discarded wall warts. Photojournalist Natalie Behring visited Guiyu, China and documented the world's biggest digital dump where, for $2 per day, the locals sort, disassemble, and pulverize hundreds of tons of e-waste. The payoff is huge: computer waste contains 17 times more gold than gold ore, 40 times more copper than copper ore. But the detritus also leaches chemicals and metals into local water supplies."

- As a resource investor, I have had some inklings of this. With all the resource depletion that's going on, the next logical place to look for minerals and materials would be the garbage dumps, landfills and what-have-you. Not sure how many grams/ton that these discarded machines contain, but I can tell you that if a mining company can dig up just 10 grams per ton (concentration of gold inside ore), it's considered a good discovery. That's a ratio, if you've been paying attention. 10 ppm (parts per million). 10 grams of gold inside 1 million grams of other stuff.

The problems are in labour and extraction. You need cheap labour to sort out the stuff. That, or a very co-operative citizenry who does the separation before throwing it away (how thoughtful?) Extraction is the other problem - you need to separate the more expensive stuff from the near-worthless boards and plastic casings. That takes machinery, which need energy.

At a certain intersection point, taking into account increasing demand and depleting supplies, leading to soaring metals prices, labour cost, recycling technology, and energy prices, it might be doable.

See also :

1. Peak Gold?
2. Peak Copper
3. Earth's limited supply of metals raises concern
4. Shortfall of metals risks China's rise

(2007-06-26 13:06:47 SGT) [Env] Permalink

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