Swiss Gold

If you want a new place to pan for gold, head to Switzerland where researchers have found that about 1.8 million dollars-worth of the valuable substance passes through their wastewater every year. As cool as it sounds, the Swiss are not shitting gold bricks. The area where the research was conducted has a high number of gold refineries, which process about seventy percent of the world’s gold. Chances are if you’ve got any gold jewelry part of the refining process passed through Switzerland’s wastewater and was lost forever. One would think that the gold refineries would have a way to capture this excess gold as the yearly yield is around 43 kilograms (It’s almost 100 pounds via the system of measurement that put a man on the moon, but we aren't judging). It may not seem like much to the refineries, but to those of us who are buying plane tickets to Switzerland to play in their sewage for gold, it seems worth it.

The study, unsurprisingly after the initial results, also found that about 3,000 kilograms of silver (that’s more than 3 tons of silver, 6,613.868 pounds to be exact) go to waste each year as well due to the medical and chemical industries around Switzerland. They should really find a way to recapture this stuff and give it to us (hello, fancy office chairs!). Must be nice to live in a country where you don’t care about the combined value of 3.5 million dollars flowing through your drain pipes every year. Way to just flush money down the drain Switzerland. Jerks.