Post by BBC World News. | Believe it or not, there is gold and silver right in our poos or human excrement. |
are investigating right now
for ways of extracting all of them.
Rare earth metals are also found in our poos
such as palladium and vanadium
which are very important metals
used in some industries in the world today.
Palladium is a rare and lustrous silvery-white metal
used in catalytic converters.
It is also used in jewelry, dentistry,
watch making, blood sugar test strips, aircraft spark plugs
and in the production of surgical instruments
and electrical contacts.
More of its applications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium.
And Vanadium is a hard, silvery gray,
ductile and malleable transition metal
used as ferrovanadium or as a steel additive.
For more of its applications, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium.
There is another team of scientist who calculated
that the amount of metals that can be extracted
from the waste of a million Americans
could yield as much as $13 million.
Amazing!
Even though human wastes are disgusting,
foul smelling, gross and so on,
they are no wastes at all.
Who would have thought that they contain
gold and silver and other precious metals?
Just like garbage that contains
a lot of junks that can be sold
and can be a source of income for a lot of people,
human wastes now could be too.
It's only a matter of time
before we have the technology
to extract those gold, silver and precious metals
right in our very own backyard.
Sounds exciting!