Mining electronic waste

Found an interesting photo essay about the electronics recycling industry in the city of Guiyu China. It has a lot of interesting pictures, and some pretty interesting stats. one ton of computer scrap contains more gold than 17 tons of gold ore. Extracting that gold though, is a lot harder. So for the moment it is cheaper for most western nations to simply dump the waste. In China, where labor is cheap, it is economically feasible to do the extraction. The pictures are pretty good, so I would recommend checking them out.

Check out the Photo essay at Foreign Policy: Inside the Digital Dump