Where is the latest gold-rush hot spot? Surprisingly, it is Suwa, Japan, a tiny industrial town about two-and-a-half hours northwest of Tokyo. Japan is notoriously resource deficient, as evidenced by its numerous imports, but a sewage plant in the middle of Suwa mined more than 5 million yen (that’s nearly $60,000 U.S.) worth of gold in its first month of the process out of — you guessed it — sewer sludge.
Nearly 4 pounds of gold can be extracted from each ton of incinerated molten fly ash that comes into the facility. It’s now a booming business, and extraction can’t happen fast enough. The facility accommodates and treats about 100,000 tons of wastewater every day, generating 3 tons of fly ash in the process. With the increased value of gold and the stepped desire to repurpose gold in modern-day mobile devices, the Suwa plant may be on to something.
The central Nagano prefecture, where the Suwa Basin is located, houses numerous precision machining companies, metal plating, electronics facilities and hot springs, which could be the reason for the abnormally high concentration of gold in the wastewater sludge. Though this recent find may not put the country of Japan on the map as a world-renowned gold supplier, it certainly helps lessen the need for importing.