You Can Refine Platinum Out of Roadside Dirt
If you try really hard, you can refine gold out of garbage old computer parts. But that's not the weirdest place you can find precious metals, not by a long shot. If you're looking for platinum, for example, you need look no further than the dirt on the side of a major roadway.
What is platinum doing there? It's coming from the catalytic converters in all the passing cars, and while there aren't exactly chunks of it just laying around, it is there and you can get it out as Cody from Cody's Lab has taken the time to prove.
Just as with his gold refining experiments, this isn't exactly practical. Cody found that a cupful or roadside dirt was enough to make a bead of platinum that's barely even visible, and that's after a considerable amount of science-ing. By Cody's calculations, you'd have to process a literal ton of dust before you could get a sizable yield of about seven grams.
There's pretty much no way this could be profitable, even considering that there's some silver in there too. It's no wonder there isn't a huge market for highway dirt. Still, it's remarkable what you can find just lying around on the side of the road.
Source: Cody's Lab
