Finding gold on the streets

Last week, news outlets around the world started reporting about a man in New York by the name of Raffi Stepanian who was making his living by literally finding gold on the streets. The media flocked to this, firstly because everyone loves to read about people making money from nothing and secondly because it gave EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM an excuse to write headlines using the cliched 'streets paved with gold' line.
The basic facts of this story are that Mr Stepanian has been crawling around the jewellery shop areas of New York (around 47th street and the 'Diamond District'), picking up gems and precious metals from cracks in the pavement. When interviewed he stated that he had made $1010 in the fortnight and was "surviving on it", according to the UK's Daily Telegraph.

The Telegraph followed this up with a slightly less impressive test in Hatton Garden, the jewellery and metal district of London, where they failed to collect more than 0.0004oz of gold in a day, although this could be attributed to the better practices of UK jewellers in preventing wastage blowing out on the streets.

Mr Stepanian is an ex-jeweller himself and obviously knows his trade well, it is unlikely everyone could do this. It does however illustrate an interesting fact that when an asset like gold reaches the highs it has seen recently (around $1500/oz) it becomes economical to start extracting it from less dense and previously ignored sources, even the cracks in the side walks of New York. What other untapped resources are around us waiting for exploitation?

With the current ecological trend towards recycling gathering more and more momentum every day, inflation hitting countries hard and commodity prices rising, who knows where the next 'gold rush' will be.