Your husband gives you a new tablet for Chanukah. Or you get a new gaming console for Junior as a Christmas gift.

There’s no doubt about it. The holidays are the time of year when older electronic devices get replaced by new ones – often dozens of them at a time. And you have a choice. You could stick all your old devices in your dresser drawer, or you could gather them up and send them to Specialty Metals Smelters and refiners and have us recover the gold, platinum and silver they contain. Before you dismiss this suggestion because you have only five or six items, let us ask you a question . . .

In case you think that scrapped computers and other old electronic devices are hard to find and send to us to be recycled, we’d like to direct your attention to statistics that were recently reported in “Electronic Waste by Numbers: Recycling & the World,” an article that was posted on March 12, 2016 on ewaste.com. Every year, vast quantities of electronic waste are tossed away. Here are some eye-opening statistics…

Here’s a video that shows how a new robot that Apple designed can pull apart an iPhone and separate out its parts. For reasons we do not know, Apple named this robot Liam. According to Apple, just one Liam robot can recycle 1.2 million iPhones a year.

If you’re emptying an old factory that produced products that contained metals, chances are good that you will discover wire that contains precious metals.  You might find coils of it in storage areas. You might find little rolls of it hiding in drawers. Unless the previous owners labeled their supplies carefully or the wire is still in its original packaging, you have very little way of knowing what kind of wire you have.

More and more towns and cities across America are holding recycling day events to collect old electronic devices. Electronic recycling days provide a needed service to individuals, who often do not know how or where to responsibly recycle old electrical devices. Whether you are a company that already has stockpiles of electronics to recycle or a company that wants to do something good for your community, you should consider getting involved. By doing good, you could also have an opportunity to earn income.

Someone called one of our expert consultants at 800-426-2344 last week and asked, “Is lithium a precious metal?” He had a lot of old printed-circuit boards that had batteries attached to them and was wondering if he would get paid for the lithium that they contained if he sent them in to be recycled.

Can silver be profitably recycled from printing ink? The answer to that question is yes, silver can be obtained from many printing inks. When you introduce the right chemical into them, the silver precipitates and falls to the bottom.  But here is some additional information you need to know.

What emerging technologies will impact on the prices and demand for precious metals in the coming year? Here are five trends to watch.

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 . . .

...Yet there is a compelling reason why business brokers should slow down a little and take a close look at the businesses that they are listing for sale: Many businesses contain sources of gold and other precious metals that can be profitably recycled with a qualified precious metals refinery like ours....