Several years back when one of the big resin factories in Japan burned down, the price of memory spiked for a year or more. There was a period there when several companies were advertising for buying used memory. I used to occasionally sell small amounts of used memory I removed from doing upgrades to a couple of them for decent prices. Working memory could be tested and resold domestically, or to third world markets. Or the chips could be remounted on more popular module types in some cases.
The memory chips themselves aren't worth any more than other chips. Typically though a bad SIMM or DIMM would only have one chip that was actually bad. So they were cheap to repair, and could be resold at a hefty profit. Much more than the amount of gold on the edge was worth. I imagine that's still the case.
macfixer01