How can WEEE ensure there's a wedding?
Gold has good conductive properties and is used in a lot of EEE. That's why a few kg of gold is recovered from the WEEE Elretur collects every year. Last year no less than 60 kg of gold was recovered from the WEEE Elretur collected from distributors and municipal recycling stations throughout Norway.
Gold is primarily recovered from scrapped mobile phones and high value printed circuit boards. From 25,000 metric tons of high value printed circuit boards one can extract around 2-3 kg of gold, which in turn can be turned into wedding rings or Olympic medals. Part of the precious metals that Marit Bjørgen and Petter Northug brought home with them from Vancouver came from recovered WEEE.
Recovering gold also has huge climate benefits as well. One metric ton of commercially exploitable gold ore typically contains 1-5 g of gold, while one ton of scrapped mobile phones may at best contain as much as 150 g of gold. Obviously, given these figures, it is much more profitable to recover WEEE - while at the same time it requires a great deal less energy to recover gold from WEEE compared with extracting gold from gold ore.