Buy a phone. Chuck a phone.
Where does your old phone go? Into your “forgot-me” drawer? Down the rubbish chute with peeled bananas or soggy leftovers?
Regardless your old phone is now trash. It’s the same for the cranky laptops, buzzy mp3 players, and defunct electronics that were thrown out over the months.
That is a problem, and it has a name: E-waste.
Remember our teaser post on turning handphone into gold?
It’s true. And we’ve got the video to prove it.
In addition to gold, recyclers can extract copper, paper, plastics and precious metals from our E-waste via the recycling process. And that’s the interesting part of it.
According to Adrian Tan, executive director of Tes-Amm (Singapore), “What gets people interested is the precious metals that you see recovered. Very often, that equates to gold. There are resources but there isn’t a lot of it. It takes a huge volume [about 50,000 phones] to generate 1 kg of gold bar.”
*Mumble mumble*. Turn this mobile phone into gold! Poof!!!
600 grams of gold = $33,800.
That’s $33,800 in my palm… Woah…
More next Wednesday!
I'm the editor of UCreateChange. And I started this blog with the intention of putting up my past weekly roundups 'cause it's a shame they're simply disappearing into people's inboxes. Anyways, if you've a question on engineering, drop me a line at creators.of.tomorrow@gmail.com!
