‘Osceola struck gold today’

Coffee Break

“Osceola has literally struck gold today,” venture capitalist Al Gore said Tuesday.

The former U. S. vice president was standing in Osceola, Arkansas, a river city north of Memphis, where metal recycler BlueOak Resources had just broken ground on BlueOak Arkansas. It will employ 75 and pull precious metals from circuit boards and other discarded electronics.

“If you want to get 10 ounces of gold from ore, you have to mine 100 tons, but you can also get 10 ounces of gold from 1 ton of used circuit boards,” Gore said, the Blytheville Courier News reported.

BlueOak board member John Correnti, an entrepreneur whose $1 billion Big River Steel minimill is going up at Osceola, led the new recycling firm to the river port.

Online newsletter Techcrunch. com says BlueOak’s $35 million in project financing came from well-heeled firms including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a Silicon Valley investor storied for early capital injections in Amazon, Google and Sun Microsystems. Gore is a Kleiner Perkins partner.