[COFF] Typical Fate of Older Hardware

I just read that on average one gram of gold is extracted from one ton of gold ore. Between the circuit runs inside chip packages and the gold coating on contacts, I'd think that discarded circuit boards could match conventional gold ore in terms of yield. There's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth concerning the world's supply of rare earth metals, which are needed for, among other things, the permanent magnets in disk drives. Wouldn't discarded hard drives be a good source of these metals vs. virgin ores? --Paul W.