Mining landfills better than digging new mines?

Sometime ago I read or heard about landfills being mined for gold in Japan

Looking into landfill mining, I found a large number of sites, mostly positive.  One I found a few weeks ago is Landfill Miners.

A search for “mining gold from landfill” or “mining copper from landfill” turned up a variety of sites about landfill mining, mostly positive.  It seems more recent articles are more positive than older articles.  Many projects reclaim a large variety of materials, many of which can be sold for less than mining the original materials.  Aluminum and copper are major materials in this category.

Buy gold?

As I was waiting at the barber shop, I had two choices.  Look at Fox News or keep my eyes closed.  The visual noise of the multiple banners of modern news broadcasts is bad enough, but the hype of the advertisements is even worse.

One of the ads that caught my attention was a company selling gold.  They offered it at one percent over dealer cost and with free shipping.

First, what do they mean by "dealer cost"?  Is that the cost to buy it in the first place?  Or is it the cost to buy it and sell it together?  After all, the sales people, the management, and the advertising are all costs for the sale.  And isn't the "free shipping" a cost?

Second, if owning gold is such a good deal, why aren't they holding it as an investment?  Won't they make more money by holding it than selling it?  Maybe they are trying to dump it before the price drops even further.

Magree's law of market timing:  When others are excited about buying, keep what you already have.  When others are excited about selling, sell what you already have.

Gold is not a good investment

In 1984 I bought a set of gold coins from an investment company that is now defunct.  One coin was in a package that showed the coin, the other two were in opaque boxes placed in sealed clear plastic.  I've kept them in the house for all this time and decided to sell them yesterday.

I took them to a coin dealer who seemed quite excited to have them and gave me a better price than I had gleaned from a few web sites.  This also shows that many people trust others.  Each coin was exactly as I received them, one visible and two in boxes that said what they were.  I assumed the original dealer had sent me what I ordered, and the buying dealer assumed what I told him.

Today I calculated my rate of return: 3.3375 percent annually!  Some good quality stocks return that in annual dividends plus appreciate in value.  Many bond funds do even better.  Of course, if you could stomach the ups and downs of a company like Apple, your return would have been around 13 percent annually.

Well, the coins are out of the house and won't be stolen or misplaced and I managed to beat the drop in the price of gold by a day.  For the dealer's sake, I hope that the price of gold goes up enough soon for him to make some profit.