[JoeAltmaier]

...except that they distribute the material so thinly, its unlikely it'll ever be economical to mine. Even the 'original' mines e.g. copper, iron, need very high mineral densities to make them worthwhile. Landfills are orders of magnitude less dense.

[garfij]

There is more gold in a ton of garbage electronics than there is in a ton of gold ore.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs060-01/fs060-01.pdf http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-14-527_en.htm http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-28802646

[JoeAltmaier]

Cool! If only electronics were concentrated somehow in a landfill, instead of thinly spread around.

[vectorjohn]

What? Why would the material be distributed thinly? It's not like they rake it all over the desert. It's extremely concentrated.

[JoeAltmaier]

Concentrated ore is essentially solid material of a single nature. Nothing resembling that occurs in landfills. Its a big pile of 'stuff' with pellets of interesting materials every few meters. That's many orders of magnitude too sparse to be worth mechanically mining.