Science View S2014E06 - Urban Mining with Microbes

We usually just throw waste into the garbage. But waste electronic devices are actually a hidden gold mine. How so? It's because their circuitry contains rare and precious metals. So resource-poor Japan may actually be resource-rich, then! But the high cost of traditional extraction methods has been a longstanding obstacle. That is, until microbes were found to offer a solution. We dig deep to unearth the latest developments in rare metal recovery.