The disassembly-line workers hammering, drilling, snipping and shredding in a north Denver warehouse each morning are pioneers in new urban mining.
End product: gold, silver, copper, aluminum.
Men wearing Kevlar-plated arm gear and safety goggles rapidly pick the valuable bits from cast-off computers, TVs, printers and home appliances that otherwise would be tossed into landfills or shipped overseas — often with still-retrievable stored data.
Traditional mining to extract minerals from deep underground pays as little as $35 a month and releases toxic pollution that poisons people, said Noah Amoah, 42, referring to gold mines in his native Ghana.
“Going under the ground, you never know if you will come out. This is better for the environment,” Amoah said Thursday as he pulled up a circuit board glinting with gold.
Today he earns $10 an hour at the 75-worker Metech Recycling plant — one of two electronics recycling businesses in north Denver. At Metech, a second shift is planned, with 15 more workers each harvesting 1,200 pounds of materials a day, executive vice president John Miller said.
“There’s gold here,” Miller said. “We already took it out of Mother Earth once. Why would we want to throw it back into a landfill?”
Over two years, jobs have grown here and at 30 other certified “e-steward” plants nationwide. Healthy commodity prices — gold goes for $1,700 a ounce — make this mining more profitable. Traditional hard-rock mining of the minerals needed to make computers, smartphones and other gizmos is becoming more complicated, with host governments and communities concerned about environmental costs.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials are encouraging this alternative.
“Why wouldn’t we do this?” said Jim Martin, the EPA’s regional administrator, who recently checked out the Electronics Recycling International plant nearby, where 25 people work. “Building a mine these days is a process that takes years, a process that requires us to build in all kinds of safeguards to make sure we’re protecting water and air quality. This is far cheaper, faster and easier.”
Source: The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley