healey36 wrote:When I worked for Hughes, we had a scrap deal with a local outfit that recovered precious metals from junk printed circuit boards. I don't recall what the numbers looked like, but it was certainly lucrative enough that folks went through the effort to extract materials from old boards. It was also my understanding that the process was fairly toxic, having to deal with high levels of lead and mercury as well (there were some also pretty serious waivers for the recyclers to provide that assured proper handling and disposal).
I used to have a copy of a published paper from one of the chem journals that analyzed the amounts and values of all the components of those pallets of surplus junk computers that were going back to China where all the precious metals and the other were recovered. To my mind at that time the numbers were staggeringly large. We keep buying the same stuff over and over that's being recycled, re-processed, etc.
