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How much gold is in computer parts ?

As our planet is stripped of its resources at an alarming rate, scientists are working on procedures to reuse or recycle every consumer product. Cars may be the easiest products to recycle, because they are made up mostly of large metal parts that can be melted down right after rust, paint and other materials are removed.

Non-digital household appliances are also easy to recycle, usually the outer casing is made of one material and inside there are electric motors, heating elements, compressors, pumps …etc. and maybe different fluids or gases (ex: refrigerator). Materials from these products can be reused close to 100%, but it requires some skilled workers and special machines.

Electronics (consumer products with circuit board inside) are the hardest to recycle, because when they are turned on, materials deteriorate inside in different components, so some of them end up in an ecological garbage dump in sealed containers. The average lifespan of such products is from 3 to 7 years and the components inside are not designed to live far past these age limits.

Computers are the most complex electronic products around and their components have very short lives because faster and better versions of these components become available in every 6 months, if not sooner. Every computer part includes at least one circuit board with chips, capacitors, transistors …etc. on them.

There are two materials that absolutely must be extracted from circuit boards: copper and gold. Conductors on a circuit board from one component to another are made of copper plates, sometimes not only on two sides, but also between the board’s layers (up to 3-10 layers in some extreme cases). Very thin layers of gold are used on circuit boards where they make contact with other components like expansion slots.

Even mounting holes are often plated with gold to provide a very good contact with the grounding.

The contacts of ports and connectors are also covered with gold, including the back of the microprocessor (starting with the first models).

So just how much gold is in computer parts ?

A simple answer would be less to none (compared to copper content for example), because these gold plates are very thin, sometimes only a molecule thick. Basically these gold plates are used only to improve the contact between two copper conductors. Gold is never used instead of a conductor, mostly because it’s very expensive.

Not so long ago another computer part was improved in a way that it significantly changed how much gold is in computer parts. The part I’m talking about is of course is the CPU (and GPU) cooler, that has been made of aluminum for a long time (some with a copper central part or copper plating), but this wasn’t enough for the high-speed components that appeared a couple of years ago. Processors (CPU) reached a 90-140Watt power consumption, while graphic chips (GPU) even 300Watts so heat sinks also had to be improved.

Some are almost completely covered with gold.

Other cooling solutions have only a gold plate base, which comes in contact with the processor (or GPU), because this is the most important part where heat has to be transmitted with the highest efficiency between the CPU and heat sink.

CPU coolers usually don’t get recycled often, because models that are made with copper or gold are part of the enthusiast category, which can handle 2-5 future processor generations from the time of purchase.