In a previous incarnation, the gold used to make a new line of fine jewelry may have been part of a circuit board in your last phone or laptop. The gold is mined from e-waste collected in a national recycling program, turned into gold bars, and delivered to a jewelry manufacturer.

“This has never been done before,” says Nikki Reed, founder of Bayou With Love, a brand that partnered with Dell to make the limited-edition line of rings, bracelets, and other jewelry, called the Circular Collection. (Reed is also an actress known for her roles in the Twilight movies.)

Dell, working with Goodwill, has collected electronic waste for a decade as part of a larger sustainability plan. But it’s taken time to work with a recycler to develop a process that can sustainably harvest gold from old gadgets, without the harsh chemicals that recyclers have used in the past. The company is now using its recycled gold to create a pilot line of motherboards, and will later use it in more products. The jewelry line is an attempt to draw more attention to the challenge of e-waste.

The world may generate nearly 50 million tons of electronic waste this year; only a tiny fraction of that will be recycled. But the gadgets that end up in the trash, or forgotten in drawers, have valuable materials like gold and silver inside. A 2015 study estimated that consumers were trashing more than $2 billion worth of materials inside e-waste each year in Europe alone.

Manufacturers, in turn, typically use virgin materials to make new products, despite the environmental cost of mining. Gold is the most malleable metal and the second-best conductor of electricity (it can also easily be made into micron-thin leaf) is well suited for circuit boards. It usually comes from open pit mines, where miners blast rocks with dynamite, drill, crush the ore, and use chemicals to strip out tiny amounts of gold. A typical wedding ring may generate 20 tons of mine waste, which is sometimes dumped into rivers. In the Congo, the proceeds from gold mining, along with mining for tin, tungsten, and tantalum, also found in electronics, has funded years of war.

In 2013, Dell set a goal to put 50 million pounds of recycled content back into Dell products by 2020, beginning with plastic; when the company met that goal early, in 2016, it doubled the number to 100 million pounds. Through its recycling program with Goodwill, which accepts electronic waste made by any manufacturer, it now has a steady supply of recycled material, including gold.

“Phones, tablets, and notebooks today have a relatively small amount of gold in each individual device,” says Scott O’Connell, director of environmental affairs and global producer responsibility at Dell. “But in the aggregate, when you’re bringing tens of millions of pounds of electronics into the program that we run, with that scale, you’re able to collect an amount of gold that we can start to put into our supply chain, as well as partnerships like with Nikki.”