1. What Rare Minerals are in your cell phone?
By Adam M

2. Excuse me?
Did you know that you may have precious Metals locked inside your cell phone?
These minerals are: Gold, Copper, Tantalum, Tin, silver, platinum and tungsten along with some others. Would you ever imagine that rare minerals make up 12 percent of your phone?

3. Gold
Gold is used in a phone’s wiring chips because of it’s excellent conductivity, which allows it to conduct signals smoothly. Silver is a better conductor, but gold is used more often. It used more often given that it has a better corrosion resistance over silver.

4. Copper and silver
Copper in phones is used for connecting wire to each part of the phone. For example, there is copper wire in phone chargers. Copper is relatively easy to find in electronics, and you most likely have seen it if you have ever ripped pair of headphones or something along those lines.
Silver is used for conducting, just like gold. It can also be used as a covering paste, and is more expendable given that it is less expensive than gold.

5. Platinum
Platinum is one of the most important minerals in an electronic. It can be found in the glass screen of your phone. It also increases your storage. It strengthens the magnetic field that holds your storage, therefore increasing the amount of storage it can hold.

6. Tantalum
Tantalum is used in the phone’s capacitators because it has an extremely high capacitance. This means that it can hold a lot of electricity in a small place, which allows us to have the smaller phones we all use so we don’t need a larger part for a larger part of electricity.

7. TIn
Tin is used in the soldering of the circuit boards. (I couldn’t find much info about it.)

8. Experiment
My idea for an experiment was, see how a phone would work without it’s key components. This interested me because if the phone still worked without these minerals, the companies could save a lot of money! It would lower manufacturing costs and the prices of phones!

9. Thanks!
When you give away your phone, take out the rare earths first 