One tonne of end-of-life mobile phones can hold traces of gold, silver, copper, platinum and palladium; researchers measured up to about 141 grams of gold alone

One tonne of discarded cell phones can contain as much as 141 grams of gold. According to a 2023 study titled “Critical and strategic metals in mobile phones: A detailed characterisation of multigenerational waste mobile phones and the economic drivers for recovery of metal value,” published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, that same tonne of such cell phones also contains 270 grams of silver, 53 kg of copper, 18 grams of palladium, and 10 grams of platinum.

On the other hand, a tonne of gold ore extracted from the Earth usually yields between five and twenty grams of gold, so, gram for gram, a tonne of used phones can outperform a tonne of freshly mined ore when it comes to recoverable gold. However, few people think of this aspect. A cell phone breaks down or gets outdated, and it ends up being stored somewhere at home, where it typically sits, unused, for years. Now imagine all these unused cell phones multiplied by the hundreds of millions of people who own them. It results in truly impressive numbers of unextracted metals in people’s houses across the country.

The numbers that should shake the tech industry


This is not an outlier finding. The same study even assigns a financial value to the finding: a ton of discarded smartphones alone may contain printed circuit boards worth more than $55,000, once the components are analyzed and their cost calculated. Look at it globally, and the sheer scale becomes impossible to overlook.

As noted in the 2024 UNITAR article on Global E-Waste Monitor, global production of e-waste was at 62 million tonnes in 2022, which contained an estimated value of 91 billion dollars worth of embedded metals, including 15 billion dollars worth of gold. Only 22.3% of that e-waste was documented as formally collected and recycled that year, and UNITAR's own figures put the value of the recoverable resources that went unaccounted for, mostly landfilled or otherwise lost, at about $62 billion.

So why is your phone still in the drawer?

This is a real disconnect worth examining: people generally recognize that their old phones hold some value, yet most still don't act on it. In a study titled “Urban mining: The relevance of information, transaction costs and externalities,” published in 2023 in the journal Ecological Economics, researchers surveyed thousands of participants in Switzerland and uncovered some nearly universal behavior.

Based on their results, the vast majority of people hold onto their used phones for no reason at all; many couldn’t even explain why, and quite a few would prefer to keep their damaged phone than get less than five dollars for selling it. The researchers link this less to laziness than to a kind of inertia, combined with a lingering sense that the phone might still come in handy one day. The study's authors frame this as a common pattern well beyond Switzerland alone, though their survey data itself comes from that one country.

Why "just recycle it" isn't actually the whole story

The ironic part of the story is that the process of separating metals from electronic waste is not some pipe dream of environmentalism. It is real, and it can recover some metals with less of an environmental impact than mining new metal from the earth. The limitation here is not one of science or engineering. It is one of logistics.

In the United States specifically, formal e-waste processing infrastructure remains patchy and inconsistent from one state or municipality to the next, and most consumers there have no default, easy channel for disposing of a dead phone. That's a separate, infrastructural problem from the psychological one the Swiss survey describes; the two reinforce each other, but they aren't the same issue, and the U.S. is only one example of a country where this gap shows up.

What this actually means for us

Certified e-waste recyclers and large carriers or manufacturers of such devices will gladly take the old device from you for nothing and, in many cases, will actually pay you for it. The gold in one particular phone may be valued only at one or two dollars, which means that no one makes huge money off one device. However, multiply this value by the total number of estimated phones that become unusable in one particular year, and you may get an idea of what is being wasted.