Charlotte MacDonald
speaker
1,889 appearances
62 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Apr 2025
Charlotte MacDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So what is the right answer?
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What about sex education in schools?
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Surely that's a factor.
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There's the catch.
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This is the version first broadcast on Radio 4.
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Here's Tim Harford.
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OK, well, let's start with the first part of the comparison, that it takes a tonne of ore to get one gram of gold.
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Now, most people's idea of gold mining is probably prospectors finding nuggets of gold.
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But according to Dr Dave Holwell, who's an economic geologist from the University of Leicester, the reality of modern mining is different.
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Well, phones do contain tiny amounts of gold, mostly in the SIM card.
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Now, the EU figure comes from the UN, and the UN got it from a material technology company in Brussels called Umicore.
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And Umicore said, yes, the number checks out.
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In fact, they reckon mobile phones are an even richer source.
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About one gram of gold for every 35 mobile phones recycled.
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Or to look at it another way, the company says one tonne of old phones yields about 300 grams of gold.
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Well...
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Think about it this way.
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At current gold prices, the amount in your mobile phone is worth about 60p.
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It's pretty difficult to get it out, so it's not really something that's going to make you or me rich.
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OK, there are just over 80 million mobile phone subscriptions in the UK and almost 7 billion worldwide.
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Showing 301–320 of 1,889 · page 16 of 95
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