E-waste offers economic opportunities for Indonesia if we can recycle it.
While it contains hazardous elements that need to be processed and contained, it also includes valuable metals such as copper, gold, silver, platinum, palladium and other strategically valuable metals for technologies we use every day.
The concentration of selected metals in e-waste is, in some cases, higher than in their primary minerals/ores underground.
One example: it takes about 0.5-1 tonnes of gold ores to produce the gold in a wedding ring (about 2 grams). This same amount of gold can be obtained from just 15-30kg of end-of-life mobile phones.