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In 2009 there were 1.2 billion that's right billion cell phones made.
I have to guess we throw away almost as many each year.
i saw an article saying they use 0.034 grams of gold in each phone.
1,200,000,000 x 0.034g = 40,800,000grams
divided by = 31.1034768 grams per troy oz = 13,146,545 oz
times $1373.60 current gold price =$18,058,094,212
18 billion in the trash every year??
or is my math off?

$44 a gram x .034 is about $1.50 a phone.
it works out the same still - $18 billion

Math looks solid......do you have a link to the article? I have heard/read the same thing but it was silver instead of gold.

eitherway....non recoverable.....lost to the landfill PMs.... make our stacks a little more valuable.

did a little searching myself and came up with these two links:

http://www.pacebutler.com/blog/cell-pho ... ling-gold/

http://www.qondio.com/cell-phone-scrap-and-urban-mining

Nothing concrete (trials/hard numbers).....but worth reading nontheless

anybody got any old cell phones they want to sell?

justoneguy wrote:In 2009 there were 1.2 billion that's right billion cell phones made.
I have to guess we throw away almost as many each year.
i saw an article saying they use 0.034 grams of gold in each phone.
1,200,000,000 x 0.034g = 40,800,000grams
divided by = 31.1034768 grams per troy oz = 13,146,545 oz
times $1373.60 current gold price =$18,058,094,212
18 billion in the trash every year??
or is my math off?

$44 a gram x .034 is about $1.50 a phone.
it works out the same still - $18 billion

Don't know if the two primary facts are correct but check your math. You're off by a factor of 10.

1.3 million toz. Using $1414/toz that's $1.855 billion.

you're off by a factor of ten.
40,800,000 divided by 31.1034768 = 1,311,750

in any case most of what we throw away gets looked through at the landfill. Either by employees, or random people strolling the landfill looking for valuable stuff (such as phones), or just about anything of value. I would say of the $1.855 billion thrown away every year at least $1 billion is recovered if not more.

...and let me point out.. Waste Management.. One of the future mining stocks...

there are companies that are already buying used cell phones on the cheap and just stockpiling them until it becomes worthwhile to mine them.

Cash 4 Phones?

So, if you wanted to set aside a troy ounce worth of cellphone gold, you'd have to have 31.1/0.034 ~ 915 cellphones. Yeah, about a $1.50 worth of gold in them. Time and energy might be easier in long & short run to buy nickel boxes and look for war nickels. Current value as of 10.18.13 ~ $1.23 silver value per a nickel. Finding nickel boxes is very easy usually versus finding disposed of free cellphones. Incidentally, the ocean is full of dilute gold:

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gold.html


This is interesting too:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... vironment/