My recent post on Music from Mobiles garnered a gem of comment from Abhirbhav which I deeply appreciate as it got me to immediately read and understand more on this subject.

This post is a sequel to that comment.

Gold is a precious metal which is also conductive and pliable and it retains a stable value better than many other commodities.

Here are few interesting facts I came across through GOOGLE search.

1.Laptops, phones, cameras, and the like are filled with gold plated circuit boards even printers and scanners have gold, silver, and copper, even platinum in them.
Generally, you can get at least a little bit of gold out of anything that contains a circuit board, with additional gold found in elements like connective pins. Computers tend to be the electronics with the most gold in them, but camcorders, game consoles, and cell phones also contain gold.

2.The materials recovered are reused in new electronics parts and the gold and other precious metals are melted down and sold as ingots to jewelers and investors as well as back to manufacturers who use gold in the circuit boards because gold conducts electricity even better than copper.

3.And also not to forget the sim cards do have gold but it takes a lot of cards to just get 1 gram of gold.
1kg of sim cards will get you on average 1.5g of gold.

So certainly it is profitable, to recycle gold from electronic devices because it makes your outdated electronics so valuable even after they’ve reached the end of their life cycle.

Thank you Abhirbhav for initiating this direction of thought and the ensuing learning from it.

For those who are curious and want to understand more
Here is an interesting link