Japan has discovered an unlikely and abundant source of gold. Raw sewage.
A sewage incineration plant in Nagano has discovered that it can extract more gold from the ash of incinerated sludge than the world’s biggest gold mines.
How much more? Compare about 1,890 grammes per tonne of sewage ash to a max of just 40 grammes per tonne of gold ore.
Before you reach for the gas knob and start using your oven to offload your previous meals (urgh, you’re disgusting, but given the current price of gold, who’d care?), the high yield at the plant isn’t due to the human stomach having discovered the secrets of alchemy.
Rather, it is due to the numerous nearby manufactures who use gold to produce precision equipment. This somehow ends up in the waste sludge, though we suspect that this is just a cover-up story and they have genetically modified their lifetime employees to shit gold who sometimes suffer from bouts of diarrhea.
Link to main story (Reuters)