Editorial

EVERY YEAR, A STAGGERING AMOUNT OF OUTDATED TECH AND THE PRECIOUS METALS WITHIN ARE TOSSED AWAY, SO WHAT IS BEING DONE TO FIND THE TREASURE IN THE TRASH?

THE CITY OF Albuquerque, New Mexico, is home to what is probably the world’s smallest gold mine. Rather than digging for the precious metal, it’s instead recycling it from existing technology, specifically by stripping down a part of your mobile phone that you forget about as soon as your handset is turned on: your SIM card.

Gold is an integral part of SIM cards, and the ABC reports that materials chemist Dale Huber and his team at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque are using ultrasound to extract the metal from the SIM. Sandia Labs dunks the SIM in water and directs ultrasonic waves at the card, causing it to bubble and release the precious particles. This method is more environmentally friendly than using mercury to dissolve the gold, as that resultant mix then needs to be boiled in order to extract the gold, and the mercury is then usually lost in the air.

Ingenious, no? Rather than mining the earth for more metal, it’s reusing what’s already abundantly available, one of those remarkable ways of recycling that a lot of people probably don’t know about, like scrunching up aluminium foil into a ball or crimping it inside another aluminium can so that it can be reused. Huber estimates that, globally, $20 billion of precious metals are wasted every single year thanks to technology being dumped. Closer to home, the United Nations University says that Australia generated 570,000 tonnes of e-waste in 2016, and only 7.5% of that was recycled. As a country, we have lofty goals to improve in some areas, as the Australian Government has set a target of recycling 80% of discarded TVs and computers by 2021–22 (up from 17% in 2010–11).

You can do your part to keep metals out of the ground. You can look up one of the 1,800-odd collection points around the country (found on

if something is totally dead. As we’ve pointed out in previous issues of TechLife, if the thought of chucking it makes you uneasy, you can sell your ‘unwanted but still working’ stuff on sites like eBay or Gumtree, or pass it on to friends and family members (just make sure all sensitive data has been wiped or destroyed before you do).

And if you have any other ideas for re-using or recycling old tech, the TechLife team would love to hear them, so please do get in touch.