BlueOak Resources, a Burlingame, California-based startup, plans to mine for and refine gold, silver, copper, and other precious metals in the US. But before you call your local chapter of the Natural Resources Defense Council to organize a protest in anticipation of environmental calamity, consider the source from which the company plans to “mine” such valuable materials: our old electronics gadgets.

According to BlueOak’s cofounders Priv Bradoo and Bryce Goodman, instead of partaking in such environmentally destructive, dangerous, and carbon-intensive activities as strip-mining, open-pit mining, and mountaintop removal and extraction to bring the precious metals and rare earth elements necessary to power our electronics gadgets to market, the company instead aims to focus on “above the ground recovery.”

“BlueOak’s goal is to provide a distributed and domestic solution for e-waste recycling. We aim to enable circular integration in the technology supply chain, converting the e-waste of today into a sustainable source of metals and rare earths for the technologies of tomorrow,” according to the company’s website.

On Tuesday, BlueOak is breaking ground on its first urban e-waste mine and refinery, in Osceola, Arkansas. The facility will begin production in 2015, and the company hopes it will be able to initially process 15 million scraps per year. BlueOak has raised $35 million in seed money from the Arkansas Teachers’ Retirement Fund and the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, reports Wired.

BlueOak believes its efficient mini-refineries will revolutionize the treatment of end-of-life electronics and provide a “sustainable source of critical metals and rare earths for the technologies of tomorrow," notes the company's website.

BlueOak's motivations for starting the company stem from some of the chilling statistics the company reports on its website: US consumers dispose of some 3.2 million tons of e-waste annually, with more than 80 percent ending up in the trash and contributing over 70 percent of all toxic metals in our country’s landfills.

Further, the company reports:

We currently spend upwards of $12Bn per year searching for virgin ore deposits, while the most concentrated sources of coveted metals is literally put to waste. For example, every 20 minutes the US discards one ton of cell phones containing over 70 times the amount of gold and silver found in virgin ore…. [while] less than 1% of rare earths contained in discarded products are recovered by recycling.

While BlueOak describes its e-waste mining concept as potentially revolutionary and game-changing, others, like Josh Lepawsky, a scholar studying the effects of e-waste, are more guarded in their praise of the company's likely impact because used materials only make up approximately 3 percent of the waste in the world.

“It’s not that I don’t think what they’re doing might be positive,” Lepawsky told Wired, “but it’s going to be directed at that roughly 3 percent of all waste.” Rather, since most waste comes from the manufacturing and production processes themselves, Lepawsky told Wired that a better approach might be for a company to collect waste byproducts at the manufacturing source itself, as “anything that moves material and energy recovery up the value chain prior to purchase is going to have a much more sustainable impact.”