On the 5th Day of Christmas my supply chain gave to me…

…5 gold returns

“Thar’s gold in them thar hills”

The saying is part of my US heritage.

But are the hills still made of gold, or should we look at gold another way?

Grass AF GmbH helps by posing this question to you:

Which yields more gold?

• a gold mine with moderate yield? or
• a cell phone with about 100g (just over .22 lbs) of dead weight?

To figure this out, Grass AF tells us you need to know that a “normal” gold mine with moderate yield “can extract about one gram of gold per ton of mined gold”.  And each mobile phone has about .024 grams of gold inside its 100 grams.

As you know, there are tons of cell phones out in the world.

How many?

For 2022, the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) estimates that the global population of 7.95 billion people (as of June 2022) held 8.58 billion mobile phone subscriptions.

If:

1 ton of cell phones about 240 grams of gold, and

1 ton of gold mining yields about 1 gram of gold

Which is the better way to get your 5 gold cell phone rings?

One more big number calculation:

8.58 billion mobile phone number equates to about 204 million grams of gold (or about 449,743 pounds) – no digging required, just returns and refurbishment, or returns and recycling, or returns and upleveling, or returns and repair, or returns and … you get the idea.

And this is just considering the gold in cell phones, not computers or routers or ….

There’s gold in them thar electronic devices!

What value are you overlooking that could be giving your business golden returns?

Thank you for reading my blogs

#supplychainreturns #returns #goldreturns #ProcessandStrategy #CynthiaKalinaKaminsky

Cynthia Kalina-Kaminsky is an ASCM Master SCOR instructor and consultant, and a supply chain professional.  With you, she uses SCOR as a foundation for supply chain innovation, transformation, digital capability building, and sustainable/resilient supply chain performance you and your business can depend on. Learn more here