In reply to The Lemming:
More (old) stats for you.
"A ton of used mobile phones, or about 6,000 handsets, contained about 3.5 kg (7.7 lb) of silver, 340 grams of gold, 140 grams of palladium and 130 kg of copper, StEP said. A phone battery contains another 3.5 grams of copper.
"Combined value: over $15,000 at today's prices,"
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ewaste-idUSTRE58E5JF20090915
Which sounds very lucrative. But when you do a google images for :
"e-waste india" or "e-waste africa" you get a different picture (excuse the pun).
(e-waste uk shows a bunch of charts and bar graphs, because we're good at recycling and the have charts to prove it.)
I expect that in many cases, its quicker and easier to burn the items and extract the large amount of copper, than to do labour and process intensive work and recycle all of the metals.
I hope that I'm wrong though and someone can point me in the right direction.