One man’s garbage is another man’s gold – or so goes the saying. I doubt that the old adage was meant to be taken literally, though. But in Japan, things have developed in such a way that you can actually take this saying at face value!
According to news reports, which have created much commotion by the way, more gold has been found in a sewage treatment facility than in some of the best gold mines in the world. The sewage treatment facility, called Suwa, is located in Nagano prefecture, northwest of Tokyo. The Telegraph has this story:
Tens of thousands of pounds worth of gold has been found at the Suwa treatment facility in the past year, with more than 1,890 grammes of gold per tonne of ash recorded from incinerated sludge.
The gold yield significantly surpasses levels at Japan’s Hishikari Mine, one of the world’s leading gold mines, where 20 to 40 grammes of the precious metal are found per tonne of ore.
The unexpected presence of soaring levels of gold in sewage has been attributed to the high concentration of precision equipment manufacturers using the precious metal in the Nagano region.
But that is not the end of the story! Apparently, one can also find gold from other sources aside from the treatment facility. The same principle applies – equipment and other materials contain gold and other precious metals like silver and when people get rid of them, they all go to the high tech waste dumps. Once there, they are open for the taking.
Now who would have thought about that?
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Posted February 5th, 2009 by Maki | Comments (2)
During bad economic time like this, it is something good to hear there is a “gold mine’ in Japan.
Japan has never been short of gold (dirty politicians were found with gold bars stored in their houses during the boom), but I wouldn’t have guessed the sewer.