Although there is gold in several components of your electronic devices, the total amount in a notebook remains quite small and would not yield much if it were collected and smelted.
Inside your electronic devices are rare earth metalssuch as neodymium and europium, as well as precious metals such as gold and silver.
While this might give you the impetus to start opening casings to find out how much gold is actually in your smartphone, it probably wouldn’t be a very profitable endeavor. According to , gold experts say that it would be necessary dozens of cell phones just to extract a gram of gold.
But this raises a related question: how much gold is there really on your old laptop? Since laptops are, as a rule, quite larger than smartphones and include more componentsone would expect them to contain a little more gold inside.
And in fact, gold is widely used inside a computerespecially in integrated circuits, connectors and other contacts. However, although gold appears in several spots, the total amount in a laptop continues to be greatly reduced and it wouldn’t yield much if it were collected and melted.
The esteem that there is 0.2 grams of gold inside a common computer, maybe a little more. Laptops generally fall on the lower end of the computer scale, and SD Bullion estimates that each contains about 0.1g of gold.
Just like with cell phones, it’s not muchbut it could be valuable on a large scale… if it were willing to disassemble hundreds of devices to make the process profitable. Imagine the amount of labor required to collect the devices and disassemble them, and then separate and fuse the materials!
As general properties of gold are what make it such an excellent material for use in electronics, specifically printed circuit boards and other major components such as processors (CPU) or RAM memory.
To begin with, gold is highly conductivewhich is fundamental for modern electronics. But pure gold also doesn’t degrade or oxidize over time, unlike metals prone to rust. Within electronic devices, this means that the material does not lose its efficiency over time in a measurable way.
That’s why gold is used to coat connectors, switches, delicate connecting wires, circuits, and more—places where electricity is channeled, transmitted, or generated. Additionally, gold plating is used to increase the corrosion resistance of various componentsincluding printed circuit boards, preventing long-term wear.
At the moment, virtually all electronic devices Modern technologies include gold in small quantities, not just computers or smartphones.
Home appliances like refrigerators, washers and dryers, vacuum cleaners, televisions, and even your automobile have printed circuit boards inside in addition to smaller components that employ gold.
This is one of the main reasons why it is preferable to recycle your old electronic devices instead of just throwing them away and let them end up in a landfill. These rare materials can be recovered and reused, but recycling can also prevents them from contaminating the soil or local environment.
