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ODATE, JP -- Many small pieces can add up to a big whole, and one small city in the north of Japan is finding there's money in the process as well. Odate, a city of about 80,000 people in Akita Prefecture, on the northern end of Honshu, the big island of Japan, has begun diverting small electronics from landfills and using the town's mining history to salvage precious metals from the waste. By putting collection bins outside supermarkets and community centers, the city gathering about 17 tons of e-waste in 11 months, from April 2007 to February 2008, according to a report from Harufumi Mori in Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper. The gadgets collected range from broken appliances to hair dryers to cell phones -- all too small to fall under the scope of recycling laws in Japan. Although they're small, they're far from worthless, the city is finding. After looking through just over one-third of the waste, Mori reports that the city might find as much as half a kilogram of tantalum, one kilogram of gold, and as much as 4 kilograms of silver and palladium. All from less than one year of collections in one city among a gadget-crazy country with over 127 million residents. As a former mining town, Odate is well equipped to harvest precious metals from e-waste.

The 11 workers at Goodwill are part of a 10-week program designed to train workers for entry-level jobs in recycling what is known as electronic waste, or e-waste. The program, which began in July, trains low-skilled or displaced workers in disassembling electronics and separating the elements inside, sometimes called "de-manufacturing."