my thought also, i wish i knew what karat they use.
i have acces to a lot of used equipment, and im intrigued by the possibility of it to be extracted.
There's gold in them thar circuit boards -- laptops, phones, cameras and other devices use the precious metal to connect components, and it can be extracted relatively simply
www.wired.co.uk
Karat is a reference to purity. Most extraction methods would require Aqua regia, a mix of strong acids that can actually dissolve gold, to actually separate out the gold. The alternative industrial process grinds the entire motherboard into a fine powder and burns off everything but the gold. In either case, karat would be determined by your process of purification and not the initial value of the purity.
Both aqua regia and and industrial grinding are prohibitively expensive. Motherboards themselves are largely silicon (glass), so you're actually hoping to get gold from the components. Extraction of rare earths is largely something that people do with much older electronics...where you had to have them (old electronics having used rare earths as a means around material performance issues). I'd suggest that anybody thinking this is a viable financial option should really reconsider...as it's mostly governmental grants and favorable terms which allow this enterprise to be profitable.
Let me also dissuade from a bunch of other stupid get rich quick schemes.
1) No, melting silver dollars into silver ingots or fashion items does not appreciably increase its value.
2) No, Seinfeld was wrong. The amount of energy and time required to return a bunch of bottles for the refund value is not inherently profitable without prohibitively expensive fuel usage due to the volume of items that would be required to make the trip worth your time.
3) No, recycling old tools for components is not profitable. By the time you unspool the wire in motors, melt is down, and create a copper ingot you've spent more than the metal can return unless the tool was free and ancient (modern tools are almost uniformly cheaply made and cheap out on wiring because it is so expensive).
If you should decide to ignore this advice, good luck. It's kind of fun to watch someone spend 40+ hours taking stuff apart, spending thousands on safety equipment, and slowly creating an ingot of metal that is much smaller than they expected, only to do the math and discover it's sale won't break even with its extraction cost (let alone be profitable). Sometimes, people have to discover for themselves that you're trying to dissuade them for their benefit, not because you're part of the conspiracy to keep them from being a billionaire.
