15 August 2014
Last updated at 19:34 ET
"The business case is clear," he said, as he launched revised waste and recycling targets for the EU. "There's gold in waste - literally. It takes a ton of ore to get 1g of gold. But you can get the same amount from recycling the materials in 41 mobile phones."
This seems to be largely correct, whether the commissioner was talking about an imperial ton, or a metric tonne (one is 1,000kg, the other is 1,016kg).
But the business case may not be as clear as the commissioner
claims. At current gold prices, the amount in your handset is worth
less than £1 ($1.67). While Umicore says extracting gold from phones is
commercially viable, another company, London's Genuine Solutions Group,
told the BBC it makes little or no money this way.
The wider point of Potocnik's speech was to promote what he called "the circular economy". "In essence we propose to make Europe a society without waste. To take the 600 million tons of materials contained in our waste and pump them back into productive use in the economy," he said.
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Who what why: How much gold can we get from mobile phones?
It's
said that a bag of used mobile phones contains a gram of gold. There
are a lot of mobile phones in the world, so how much of the gold we need
can we get from them, asks William Kremer.
There be gold in them thar smartphones, said the European
Commissioner for the Environment Janez Potocnik last month. He didn't
use those exact words, but that was the general idea."The business case is clear," he said, as he launched revised waste and recycling targets for the EU. "There's gold in waste - literally. It takes a ton of ore to get 1g of gold. But you can get the same amount from recycling the materials in 41 mobile phones."
This seems to be largely correct, whether the commissioner was talking about an imperial ton, or a metric tonne (one is 1,000kg, the other is 1,016kg).
Continue reading the main story
The answer
- There is 1g of gold in about 35-40 mobile phones
- Some 7.4 tonnes of gold is mined per day - if we got it from phones we'd run out of them in 23 days
- Recycling phones can only provide a fraction of the gold we need
In gold-rich ore deposits, there
are concentrations of gold at one or two parts per million, says Dave
Holwell, an economic geologist at the University of Leicester. That
equates to 1g or 2g per tonne.
And the idea that 41 handsets contain 1g of gold stems from a UN report on electronic waste. Brussels-based technology company Umicore told the BBC you can actually get this amount of gold from just 35 phones.
Continue reading the main story
Imagine if you were a super-villain who had taken control of
all the world's gold, and had decided to melt it down to make a cube. How long would the sides be?
How much gold is there in the world?
To look at it another way, Umicore says a tonne of old phones (weighed without their batteries) yields about 300g of gold.
The wider point of Potocnik's speech was to promote what he called "the circular economy". "In essence we propose to make Europe a society without waste. To take the 600 million tons of materials contained in our waste and pump them back into productive use in the economy," he said.
Continue reading the main story
More or Less: Behind the stats
Listen to More or Less on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service, or download the free podcast
Of course, you can recycle gold
from a range of different products, but how far could we satisfy our
appetite for gold from phones alone? According to Dave Holwell, about
2,700 tonnes of gold are produced every year from mining - about 7.4
tonnes per day. To get that from mobile phones we'd need to recycle 300m
of them. And if we did that every day, the world's estimated seven
billion mobile phones in active use would run out in 23 days.
Additional reporting by Keith Moore and Faizal Farook. Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.
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