At least 5 percent of gold is extracted from electronic waste in China because of the booming underground e-trash industry, reports said.

It is not an exaggeration, as research found the amount of gold extracted from a ton of circuit boards is 40 to 800 times more than from gold ore.

Guo Changfeng, who lives in a village in suburban Beijing, hires 30 people to collect e-waste. He told the Economic Information Daily that a ton of circuit boards can produce 300g of gold, 5g of platinum, 30g of palladium, 2kg of silver, 25kg of tin and 120kg of copper.

Guo sends the extracted materials to his brother-in-law in his hometown, Guiyu, widely considered the world's e-waste capital, in South China's Guangdong province. Large amounts of gold are extracted and flow into the country's market from the town every day, sometimes enough to affect the world's gold prices.

Zhang Chufeng, Party committee secretary of Guiyu, said at least one million tons of e-trash are recycled annually there. No less than 15 tons of gold are produced every year, accounting for 1/20 of the country's total gold output, he added.

In 2006, the Beijing Academy of Social Science estimated that 300,000 people in the capital city were involved in the underground e-waste industry.

The United Nations Environment Program says that China produces 2.3 million tons of e-waste each year, the world's second biggest producer of this kind of trash, after the United States. By 2020, about half of the world's e-trash will come from China.

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