Precious metal recovery from PCB

The PCB itself usually consists mostly of fibreglass, resin, copper and solder with sometimes a little gold. Other components (which are soldered onto the board) may contain rare metals which may well be worth recycling. Unfortunately, processing circuit boards to recover all of its various elements individually and separately is not economically viable on a small scale and to do it on a large scale involves the careful collection of broken electronic equipment, transport to a central site and very labour-intensive work in dismantling each piece of equipment. The processes needed to recover the metals may also involve more power and environmental damage than mining and refining them in the first place. If you are interested, there are many websites which deal, in one way or another with the problem and give various solutions. Here are just a few which I found instructive and enlightening: http://www.ehow.com/how_4895744_recycle-circuit-boards.html http://www.zdnet.com/blog/emergingtech/a-new-way-to-recycle-electronic-circuit-boards/1005 http://www.instructables.com/id/Recycle-old-PCB-components/ On the whole, it's not something which looks particularly feasible as a 'home business' but, given the right contacts, it is just possible that it would be worth exploring further.