The roads may not be paved with gold but your electronic innards are.
It protects mother boards and other hardware components from oxidizing and therefore they can still carry low voltage currents.
Up until recently though, extracting that gold has not been easy, cheap, or environmentally friendly.
A start-up company formed by University of Saskatchewan researcher Stephen Foley, his two former students and a business partner, has been taken under the wings of all of the business leaders from the television show Dragons’ Den.
Foley and his team have developed a benign solvent that extracts the gold from circuit boards and other electronic waste.
Right now, gold recovery uses cyanide and heat.
The team which calls their business Excir Works, is developing a pilot process plant in Calgary.