Have you ever thought whats inside the things we throw away when it comes to electrical items few of us have the knowledge to diagnose and repair what is wrong and so inevitably we just buy a new item and throw the old one away but what exactly are we throwing away?
If we were to look at copper mining for a moment , lets imagine we woke up one morning and decided we needed some copper and the weather looked like it would lend itself to the task in hand, So armed with a shovel we went out and dug some holes and felt sure eventually that we would find some veins of copper ore, and by teatime we had struck lucky and dug out as much as we could carry, around 20kg of ore, after tucking in to our sausage egg and chips we decided we would have to learn how to refine the ore , (apparently 1000kg of copper ore contains 6kg to 10kg of copper)
which would seem to indicate that our 20kg of ore would contain at best 200g of copper.
So tired and happy we retired to bed satisfied with our 200g of copper safe in hand :)
So we managed to get a yield of 1 percent for our efforts \o/
Imagine a different scenario though we have one of those 4 way plug extensions and it has broken, it weighs just less than 1kg, but what if we take it apart.
We find the already refined copper weight to be 126g and the brass content a further 75g so even ignoring the brass thats a yield of 12.6 percent in copper proving that urban mining yields around 12 x more copper than conventional mining :)
Thanks for looking :)