You could be sitting on a goldmine, as your phone contains precious metals
(Picture: Peter Byrne/PA)One-third of all mobile phones and smartphones worldwide will be thrown away this year, according to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) forum – and only a small fraction of them will be recycled properly.
The WEEE said 5.3 billion of the 16 billion phones possessed worldwide will see the landfill or the incinerator, depriving the world of recyclable – and precious – gold, copper, silver, palladium, and other metals, which will instead have to be mined for new tech gadgets.
