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Comment by snickmy | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit surprised that there are more Silver than Copper and Zinc in electronics .

Quote: the government collected several million tonnes of equipment, and extracted 32 kilograms of gold, 3500 kilograms of silver and 2200 kilograms of copper and zinc for the bronze medals

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I'm fairly sure that this is simply the amount that they recovered for the medals specifically, not all the copper and zinc they extracted from that equipment.

So where did all the non-gold material go? The millions of tons that wasn't precious metals? I see little point in recycling something if 99.99% by volume goes to the landfill anyway.

Profit. Recycling rare materials is profitable. Keeping stuff out of landfills is not really why stuff is recycled- thats why we had that whole crisis recently with Recycling materials building up with no destination

The point is the symbolic gesture.

This doesn't help with any environmental goals.

It does, because precious metals mining is environmentally intensive, and by recovering some from trashed electronics instead you're having to do a little bit less mining.

It's something like 31 tonnes of ore must be processed per ounce of gold yielded. That's a lot of energy, fuel, caustic chemicals, and polluting mine tailings.

Lots of resources are also used when mining trashed electronics for gold.

Which "lots" is worse? I don't know, and neither do you.

No, way less resources are used in electronics recycling than in mining virgin resources. You're making a false equivalence here, or some weird kind of appeal to ignorance. Yes, it's true that some things are unknowable, but not this.

If you have a source that quantifies this, I'd be happy to believe it.

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