Did you know that the materials inside your old, outdated TV, laptop, desktop, and other electronic devices contain precious metals such as gold and copper? According to Business Insider, small startups are cashing in on the untapped potential of the e-waste industry, making as much as $85,000 per day recycling old electronic circuit boards. The initiatives will also likely continue to expand — worldwide, there's a projected $55-$60 billion worth of precious metals inside abandoned circuit boards just waiting to be collected.
E-waste is quickly becoming one of the biggest environmental hazards affecting our world today. More than 50 million tons of electronics get tossed in the trash, with much of that garbage being sent to third-world countries (most notably India) for recycling. It's an environmental nightmare that's projected to become substantially worse over the next decade due to our insatiable desire for new phones, laptops, gaming PCs, TVs, and anything that requires electricity to run.
On top of this, much of our e-waste doesn't get recycled at all, being left to rot in garages, landfills, and city streets. The United States alone only collects about 15% of all the e-waste for recycling that its citizens create on a daily basis.
The flip side to this situation is that e-waste is simultaneously becoming one of the most underrated "gold mines" of the modern era, thanks to all of the valuable metals housed inside most circuit boards. Worldwide, there's a projected $55-$60 billion worth of precious metals inside abandoned circuit boards just waiting to be collected.
Business Insider followed several scrappers and a small startup in Sydney, Australia, to see how much income these smaller entities can make from recycling e-waste. It found that solo scrappers can't make a full-time income out of e-waste yet, but scrappers who work in larger organizations, particularly organizations/startups with access to heavy machinery, can generate some serious income.
One such startup that Business Insider interviewed was Mint Innovation. Scrappers who find e-waste and drop it off at Mint Innovation can make as much as several thousand dollars per load. Mint Innovation has virtually mastered the art of metal extraction from e-waste, utilizing tons of special machines and a secret special sauce designed to break down electronic circuit boards and separate the valuable metals inside from unwanted plastics and other materials the metals are attached to.
The fully automated setup Mint Innovation has built can generate an impressive $85,000 of income per day from the raw metals it collects from e-waste. That translates into about $30 million in income per year.
Mint Innovation perfectly demonstrates the amount of potential income the e-waste industry can access right now. The problem, however, is that there is not a lot of infrastructure dedicated to e-waste processing, making it difficult for e-waste scavengers to make a livable income. That could easily change in the future, as e-waste pollution continues to rise and more entrepreneurs understand the income potential e-waste can generate.
If you want to take a crack at recycling your own e-waste, we made a fun tutorial several years ago to teach you the basics.
