How much gold is in circuit boards?

Among all kinds of circuit boards, the gold content in cell phone mainboard is the highest. From the research, one ton cell phone contain about 300g gold, while one ton gold mine only contain 5g gold. That’s to say the gold content in circuit boards is about 40-60 times high than the gold ore. Except cell phones, the camera chip and connector, computer CPU and slot, memory chip and other important electronic components all contain gold, because the high Conductive transmission signal, anti-interference and anti-corrosion of gold property.

The materials contain gold

Even 3 years before in 2016, the CAE academician Mr. Xu gave one speech on the BBS of circulation economy development that the gold amount recycled from waste circuit boards is already higher than the gold extracted from mining. This means a good recycling way for waste circuit boards could bring high benefit for the global resources circulation.

Since in 2015, the European Union enacted for developing the circular economy, till 2019, the waste recovery rate has reach to 65%-75%, with the waste treatment rate reduced to 10%. By this reference, if the circular economy development could be set out in the whole European, it could save about 1.8 trillion Euro, with 6.5% improvement for GDP and millions of employment positions.

Gold can be obtained from circuit boards recycling

As the high gold content in circuit boards, if we could make the good recovery for it, it would be an important part for the circular economy development. To recycle gold from the waste circuit boards, in order to avoid the secondary pollution to the environment, we recommend to use mechanical separation process to separate metals from nonmetals of circuit boards at first, then extract gold from the metal mixture.

For more details of the gold content in circuit boards and the recycling method, no hesitate to contact us.