That old cell phone? Dead laptop? Gaming console from 14 years back? Britain’s Royal Mint is turning tech trash into treasure. A cellphone's motherboard, for example, contains gold, because it needs to conduct electricity well. Seventeen and a half cell phones yield enough gold to produce a wedding band.

Eshe Nelson writes in a NewYork Times article: "The mint expects to process about 4,500 tons of e-waste, which includes circuit boards from televisions, computers and medical equipment, each year." The process is arduous: "the gold is leached from the circuit boards in a patented solution, which oxidizes the gold to make it soluble. The solution, saturated with gold, goes through another chemical process to make the gold solid again. It looks surprisingly like ground coffee, but 100 grams is worth about $8,405. That powder is refined till it is 99.9 percent pure, formed into long rods, then heated and cooled to make it malleable. The result in the hands of an artist: a pair of 9-karat gold hoop earrings worth $1,000.

Possible Preaching Angle:
The intense work to refine gold is nothing compared to the refining process that God uses to refine the faith of believers.