Yes, but as a gold refiner… I am not buying the gold, if I can’t profit from doing so. And that’s where this all falls apart.

Same with any other material you can harvest. Doing it with the metal slot brackets from computer expansion cards makes sense, quick, easy, no need to refine and process, but it’s probably also not worth the labor for the steel alone, *just to take the time to undo the screws and putting it in a bag, box, or what have you*. Remember stuff ends up in landfills for a reason: it’s cheaper than doing anything else, unless there’s a government subsidy.

Stuff is almost always worth more for what it is, than attempting to extract their raw materials. Even if it’s super cheap. There’s a reason why anything mass produced approaches the price of material costs. The price of the entire assembly line becomes an increasingly smaller fraction of the production costs, the more you make of it.

Yes, you could in theory apply this to waste processing, but unless we’re talking about battery or solar panel manufacturing, we’re not there yet. Because every government is shying away from the insane upfront investment to build the necessary machines to process all the world’s landfills, so there’s no worker hazards.