There's gold in Japan's landfills

There's gold in Japan's landfills

business.timesonline.co.uk

Japan's enormous high-tech rubbish dumps have become a natural resource for precious metals including gold, silver and indium.

Japan's high-tech rubbish dumps - the vast “urban mines” of landfill outside every big city - have grown so huge that the country now ranks among the biggest natural resource nations in the world.

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I wonder how many other countries also have these "urban mines". Given the current downturn of the stock market, this could prove to be a refreshing injection of funds.

business.timesonline.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

I've seen some terrible images of people (mostly kids) in third world countries using all sorts of really nasty techniques to get these materials out of huge piles old of tech - it would be great if more advanced countries did this on a bigger and safer scale - but whoever does it would have to be super responsible... there would be hundreds of different processes for all the different materials, and a lot of it probably can't be automated - hard to see big profits there, maybe it should be a responsibility of governments rather than private contractors that could be less than on the level.