Postal Gold Blog – Everything About Gold

What is urban gold mining, and why is it so important?  Japan is very well-known for its electronics industries, but the country has few natural resources to support the high production and consumption of their goods.  More than 85% of Japan’s 128 million inhabitants use mobile phones, and mobile phone recycling has become more popular in recent years.

According to a study by the recycling firm Yokohama Metal Co Ltd, a tonne of mobile phones can yield 150 grams of gold – whereas traditional gold mines yield only around 5 grams of gold per tonne of ore.  Old electronic devices also contain small amounts of silver, iridium and copper, which makes urban gold mining a very lucrative business.

However, only about 13 percent of electronic items are recycled when disposed of.  The Japanese government is trying to encourage consumers to recycle more of their old electronic devices.  They are also looking at ways to excavate landfills in order to mine gold and other metals from them.

When electronic devices are recycled, gold and the other metals are extracted, melted down into gold bars, and then sold to jewellers, investors and even back to the companies that produce electronic devices.

Other countries are also jumping on the urban gold mining bandwagon.  The amount of gold that is readily available to be mined is dwindling, and so to keep up with our consumption of gold it is necessary to explore alternative options.  We at Postal Gold wholeheartedly support recycling, as you may well already know!  Now we don’t suggest that you start tinkering with old mobile phones in order to extract the gold from them – the amount of gold in one mobile phone isn’t enough to be worth the effort of extracting it – and besides, extracting gold from electronic devices involves many harsh industrial chemicals, so it’s best to leave it to the experts!

However, if you have any other scrap gold lying around – for example broken jewellery or dental gold – you can send it in to Postal Gold.  Postal Gold is a cash for gold company, and sending in your old gold to us is a good way to make some extra cash.

Gold is one of the most useful minerals mined today because of its unique properties.  It is durable, highly malleable and can withstand many extreme conditions.

Here are a few interesting facts about the use of gold in industry:

• Of all the gold that gets mined yearly, 10% is used for industrial purposes – about 400 tonnes of gold.  Most of this gold is used in Japan, followed closely by the USA.

• Gold is a good electrical and thermal conductor.  Because of this, it is found in almost all electronic devices, including mobile phones, washing machines and even pocket calculators.  The gold used in electronic devices is refined until it is nearly 100% pure, and it is then stretched into a thin wire that is one hundredth of a millimetre in diameter (gold is extremely malleable when pure).  The wire is then used to connect semi-conductors and circuits.

• Gold is crucial in the telecommunications industry.  The diaphragms of telephone mouthpieces contain gold, and it is also used to plate the contacts of phone jacks and connecting cords.

• Gold is also used extensively in aeronautics.  It is an excellent reflector and offers protection against light and infrared rays.  Because of this, pieces of space shuttles are covered with a gold coating in order to reflect radiation and keep the inside temperatures constant.  Astronaut’s helmets have a gold coating on the visors to protect their eyes and skin from solar radiation.  Gold is also used to lubricate parts inside space shuttles because it decreases friction.

• Gold nanoparticles have a wide variety of uses.  They improve solar cell efficiency, are used to make home pregnancy testing kits more effective, and much research is being done on their potential for use in the medical industry.

All in all, gold isn’t just used for pretty objects that adorn our bodies.  It is an extremely useful and practical metal, and much of society depends on it!  Since the amount of gold available for us to mine is dwindling, it is crucial to keep what gold we have in circulation, and recycle old gold.  This is why it is important to send old electronic devices to recycling centres, so that gold and other valuable parts can be re-used.  And if you’re strapped for cash and have scrap gold lying around (such as broken jewellery, gold coins or dental gold), it’s a good idea to send it in to Postal Gold – not only will you be doing a good deed, you’ll also be getting money for it!  Visit the Postal Gold website – Postalgold.com – to find out more about recycling old gold.

About fifty years ago, the first ATM appeared on the streets.  It’s now hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t quick and convenient to withdraw money from your bank account no matter what time of the day.  But while we may view trips to the ATM as a common part of our lives, people in Dubai do it a little bit differently… Everyone knows that Dubai is synonymous with ‘luxury shopping’, but at Galeries Lafayette in Dubai Mall they have taken it a step further, boasting an impressive gold ATM, or ‘Gold to Go Machine’, as they call it.

The concept is simple: If you have money on hand, simply pop it into the machine and about twenty seconds later you can be the proud owner of a package containing a 24-carat gold nugget manufactured at a Swiss bank.  The smallest nugget that can be bought weighs 2.5 grams, but purchases of up to 30 grams are common.  The gold prices are updated every ten minutes via the internet, and the Gold to Go machine is well guarded by security cameras.

Although this may sound like a one-of-a-kind machine, there are in fact around fifty others like it stationed in other prestigious venues around the world.  In Burj Khalifa, which is the tallest building in the world (and is also found in Dubai), there is a Gold to Go machine stationed at each entrance, as well as at the top of the building.

So: if you have money you desperately want to get rid of but don’t know how, why not take a trip to Dubai and turn it into gold?  However, if you have the opposite problem and want to turn your gold into money, feel free to send it to Postal Gold.  We don’t have a turn-gold-into-money ATM, but we do have a gold kit that you can order on our website, postalgold.com.  It will only take you a minute to fill in your details on the Postal Gold website, and you can have a free and insured postal gold kit sent to your home address.

For more details, visit Postal Gold’s website, postalgold.com.

Image by Wendy Harman

Up until now, around 150,000 tonnes of gold have been excavated from the earth.  It is estimated that we have 50,000 tonnes left available for mining.  However, it has also long been known that the world’s oceans contain about 6 million tonnes of gold dissolved in sea water.

Naturally, many entrepreneurs and scientists have tried to find ways to extract this gold, dreaming of fortunes untold.  One of the most notable of these was the German chemist Fritz Haber, who received a Nobel Prize in 1918 for developing a way to synthesise ammonia.  After the First World War, Germany was forced to pay an astronomical sum of money in reparations.  Haber decided to investigate the viability of extracting gold from sea water, hoping that it could be a way to help his country pay off these debts.

However, as Haber soon found out, one tonne of sea water contains only a minuscule amount of gold.  The amount varies in different locations, but it can be approximated that a litre of seawater contains 13 billionths of a gram of gold.  Extracting the gold from seawater would produce an amount of gold that would, if you were lucky, barely cover the costs of extracting it in the first place!  And this is provided that the method of extraction is 100% efficient, which is very difficult to ensure.  Haber decided after much experimentation and investigation that the extraction of gold from seawater was highly uneconomical.

However, Haber was not the last person to investigate this possibility.  Since his time, many others have tried to find ways to efficiently extract gold from the sea.  Methods proposed (and rejected) include everything from using mercury to form an amalgam with the gold, to introducing microbes that ‘breathe’ in gold and solidify it in their waste products.

Perhaps the future will see us with advanced technology that will make gold extraction a viable and economic option.  Until then, we will just have to stick with good old fashioned gold mines, as well as recycling old gold.  On that note – if you are looking for gold buyers to recycle your scrap gold, be sure to check out Postal Gold’s website.  Since we can’t yet make gold out of water, we might as well make sure that the gold that we already have stays in circulation!