Reclaiming Gold from boards, chip and cables

Originally Posted by SaraGranms

I am wondering why no one has tried to start a larger scale business to recycle used electronics, with a focus on metal separation and purification. On one hand you have small scale recyclers like yourselves (no disrespect at all, you guys are doing amazing things) and the informal recyclers in Guiyu, China and New Delhi, India and on the other hand you have the giant metal refineries like Umicore and Boliden. I am wondering why no one is trying to attack the middle. Some posters seem to have stated refining of e-scrap only works well at a large scale. Aren't the many small-scale recyclers globally a testament to this not being true? I'd appreciate it if people could explain to me their thoughts on this matter and why refining is seen as only being economical on a Billion Dollar Refinery level. Any thoughts on how we can deal with the global exponentially increasing supply of e-waste when only a small percentage of it is actually recycled and often the giant refineries can't get their hands on everything or are just breaking even?

This is a hard post to respond to Sara. The e-waste thing is a steep learning curve. Certain understandings only come along after you've done it for awhile.

The standing policy here has traditionally been that we don't talk about refining in this place. It's because the scrapper's job is to collect and dismantle. The refiner's job is to refine. They are completely different things from one another.



There are quite a few lethal hazards involved in refining. Some will kill you outright. Others will provide you the opportunity for a long slow lingering death that will take years to complete itself. The job risks are manageable for someone with an advanced college degree in chemistry and the right equipment. The vast majority of scrappers i know in real life are barely literate. So ... job safety is one very important aspect of this.

Another pivotal aspect comes down to the skill of the refiner. Not all refiners are the same. It's only a very relative few that can achieve recovery in excess of 80%. Many hobbyist refiners recover less than 15%. It's no mean feat to complete a step by step set of chemical process that take you from raw circuit board to a chemically pure metal. Many attempt to refine but only get two or three steps along before they stall out and fail to complete the process.

These poor uneducated people in third world nations doing refining work ? It doesn't take a genius to figure out what that's all about. Poor wretched souls working for less than a dollar a day that will die of heavy metals poisoning in ten or fifteen years.