“I’ve got a stack of old air conditioners,” a caller told us recently. “They contain precious metals that you can extract and recycle for me, right?”

The lesson for real estate developers is to make sure to recover precious metals from appliances – or at the very least, to work out a deal with the scrap metal recycling company to share the value of precious metals.

How valuable are the precious metals in a single toaster? How about in a coffee maker or a toaster oven? In reality, you won’t find more than a few cents’ worth of precious metals in small appliances like those. But when the quantities of small appliances increase, things can get more interesting – and more profitable. Here are some interesting variables that can have a big impact on the potential value of quantities of smaller appliances . . .