The value of recoverable gold per handset followed this trend until 2000. Since then, the rising
gold price has kept the value of recoverable gold per handset stable and even slightly increased it in 2006 (Fig. 2).
Nevertheless, it is evident from Fig. 2 that the economics of recycling has been deteriorating over time and is unlikely to recover significantly. Table 4 shows that the revenues from handset recycling could not be improved by recovering more metals.
In the table, the high and low values of metal composition data from four different sources are multiplied with the respective metal prices in 2006 [8, 12, 13, 28, 54].
In both cases, the currently recovered metals (shown in italics) make up over 95% of the total value.