It's finely laid down in tiny amounts all over the printed circuit boards, especially in contact areas. The circuit boards are so crammed with electronic contact points, that only gold provides a good enough transmission medium to fit everything on there and still get good electric signals through.
It takes specialist technology and techniques to reclaim the gold (or other precious metals that may be used). Within the USA, there are commercial companies that will pay for large amounts of cellphones because of the reclamation values. They might pay $30-$50 or so for each phone. But you need to gather together a few thousand phones for them to be bothered to come collect them and process them, and thus pay you anything at all.
Computers are even less profitable to recycle.
And the reclamation company only manages to make it profitable by recycling ALL the bits of the phone/computer. They certainly wouldn't make a profit just extracting the gold.
So, neither will you.
It takes specialist technology and techniques to reclaim the gold (or other precious metals that may be used). Within the USA, there are commercial companies that will pay for large amounts of cellphones because of the reclamation values. They might pay $30-$50 or so for each phone. But you need to gather together a few thousand phones for them to be bothered to come collect them and process them, and thus pay you anything at all.
Computers are even less profitable to recycle.
And the reclamation company only manages to make it profitable by recycling ALL the bits of the phone/computer. They certainly wouldn't make a profit just extracting the gold.
So, neither will you.
