Why failing to recycle electronics leaves gold mines untapped

Update July 3 12:10PM ET: This article was originally published on April 23, 2018 and has been updated to include video.

There's 80 times as much gold in one ton of cellphones as there is in a gold mine, says Federico Magalini, an expert on electronic waste. That means there's enormous potential for recycling — and yet, most of us keep our old electronics at home.

Lately, there's been a lot of interest in old electronics. Last week, Apple debuted Daisy, a robot that disassembles old iPhones to recycle the materials inside. Reuters covered a South Korean factory that specializes in retrieving precious metals from car batteries. And in a recent paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, researchers argued that...

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