E-waste of electric waste usually consists of abandoned electronic equipment EEE with a significant amount of gold content in terms of concentration which can be up to 10X more than common gold ores mined industrially. Gold content of common concentrated e-waste can vary from 10g to 10kg per ton of waste vs only 0.5g to 13.5g per ton of typical gold ore.
See this YouTube video about this https://youtu.be/S6TkFGh-Tys?si=fHFNHZrFVrGRB4Uf
Tin, copper, indium, gallium, aluminum, steel, plastic, glass & more. Its not one element but many mixed together in complicated ways that makes e-waste complicated to recycled, but also the way that electronics are spread out in low density all around the world, vs ore at a big open pit mine.
Many existing mining chemical processing techniques can be used to recover valuable metals like copper & gold from e-waste. Lower value metals like aluminum and tin can also be a worthwhile profitable thing to recover, as can steel or glass if the scale of operations done on a gigaton industrial scale the way traditional metal ore mining and processing done industrially for commercial profit generation.
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