Cavite Teen Finds Gold in Junk Computers

04/29/2015 – Cavite City | When 17-year old Edwin Robles from Tanza, Cavite told his father that he wanted to work in the former’s junk shop, Edwin Sr. thought his son was joking. Junior has been out of school twice because of online game addiction, but recently swears not to play any e-game again after he was diagnosed with peptic ulcer. The pain made him changed his mind and instead of playing, he switched to Youtube whenever he is in front of his PC.

Everything has changed when he watched one of Moose Scrapper’s videos about electronics recycling. He became extremely interested when after watching the video, he saw a large haul of junk computers delivered to his father’s small junk shop.

His father’s two workers began breaking the monitors and CPU’s segregating plastic and metal parts. The PCBs are being burned and the remains are still being segregated. This forced him to ask his father to give him all the PCBs and the older Edwin gave him what he wanted without hesitation.

Junior collected 560 memory cards, 238 hard drives, 420 motherboards with processors, and some PCB from printers, scanners, and several cell phones.

He started doing what he should do based on Moose Scapper’s videos. He separated all gold plated terminals and he did it for more than a month of two to three hours a day of work after school.

His father and mother did not mind what he was doing until he collected almost three kilos of gold-plated terminals and pins.

“What are you going to do with all of these junks?”, Mrs. Robles asked her younger son. “These are gold”, Junior replied shortly. His mother did not ask for further question thinking that his son is addicted once again to something incomprehensible.

Junior continued with the process and after everything was done, he made a small gold nugget weighing 78.6 grams of pure 24-karat gold.

His parents still couldn’t believe that what Junior has is a 24-karat gold nugget; Mrs. Robles asked his sister-in-law who is working as an appraiser at a Tambunting store in Quezon City to check the object.

The whole family couldn’t believe when Gemma told them that it is a real 24k gold weighing 78.6 grams and could fetch around 134,410 pesos (based on gold price during that time – December 22, 2014)

The nugget was actually sold for 147,856 pesos a month later when Junior asked his father to buy him motorcycle with sidecar so that he can hire someone to buy junk electronics for him – separate from his father’s business.

At the time of this writing, Edwin has again collected an undisclosed amount of PCBs mostly from cell phones and toner cartridges. He has one employee working for him buying broken and non-working electronics.

See Also: Negros Construction Worker Accidentally Digs 12th Century Treasure Worth P16.8M

/Admando Rogas/ Assisted Press Cavite

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