Experiment: Can You Mine Gold From Old Motherboards? (opens in new tab)

When I was just out of High School, I worked at a computer repair shop. We probably tossed out 50-60 pounds of fried motherboards and expansion cards a week until the owner worked a deal with somebody to haul away the stuff to get the gold out. After that we had a dedicated dumpster out back for throwing circuit board stuff into. We easily got to a couple thousand pounds that year.

I think he got some percentage of the money out of the parts, it wasn't a ton of money, but better than just throwing the stuff away.

If you know someone at an electronics recyling facility, or someone who repairs TVs, or computers. Basically you first have to have access to all those boards, then you can think of setting up your business.

Never assume the power of idiocy will be subsumed by the power of common sense.

Not all discarded computers are PCs. There is a lot of history that could be permanently lost if it's not deliberately preserved.

I keep a couple generations of Apple IIs, an 8-bit Atari, Amigas, RISC boxes and Macs (a couple months back you could see a perfectly functional Mac SE as part of my living-room decor) preserved. Lots of other important machines have been destroyed or recycled. I try to do my part preserving a small part of our heritage.

Not necessarily... Umicore in Belgium recovers >100 tonnes of gold (and more of other precious and base metals) from electronics scrap in a clean way (there's residential houses 10m from the factory).

I remember seeing a video in which it was claimed their electronics scrap was richer in gold (by weight I assume) than many gold mine ore.