Turning electronic waste into gold

Anew financially viable and environmentally friendly way to recover and recycle gold from electronic waste has been outlined by scientists. With lower toxicity, cheaper cost and quicker extraction, the team has discovered an approach that could revolutionize the industry and be a veritable gold mine, so to speak.

Soo... We´r getting closer...
I have like 50kilo of scrap chips here..
All collected from carcase ive been fixing up
for friends.
-"Hey, you want the old one...."
-"Naa, keep it"

So this uni has come up wit a CHEAP and CLEAN way
of getting that gold... And FAAAST too....

"Gold is stripped out from circuits in about 10 seconds,
leaving the other metals intact," Foley said.

And seriously cheap..

Foley said it requires 5,000 litres of aqua regia to extract
one kilogram of gold from printed circuit boards, none of which can
be recycled. With the new U of S solution, one kilogram of gold can
be extracted using only 100 litres of solution, all of which can be
recycled over again. The overall cost of this solution is only
50 cents a litre.

NICE..

SOURCE OF ARTICLE

Source 2


......
"Make me rich please"
......

# yea dude. I have been hoarding gold e-waste for years. I never sell it. Now I need to use this method and start buying it from people myself! Thanks bro, this is super relevant for me as a scrapper.

a reply to: Miccey

Damnit though, they did not provide us with the method for acquiring the solution, or the process to do it. I am familiar with the aqua regiia , but it can be a pain in the ass.

It's a nice dream i've thought about it too. But 'They' the greedy ones who run this rock wouldn't allow it to go far. Unless they controlled it like they dream of controlling everything else on Planet Z. I bought a book once out of interest called..
The Book of Aquarius: Alchemy and the Philosophers' Stone on amazon.com

It's interesting, but.. who knows ...

What the alchemists were trying to do was possible (converting lead or mercury to gold), but only if you had access to a high end particle accelerator.

www.scientificamerican.com...

Some of the other things such as converting solids into liquids was basic chemistry. Water will dissolve just about anything, and then when it is evaporated through heat, that substance will recrystallize again. Ratios of particular chemicals are required to due to the different molecular weights. If you have chemical A that has a mass of X kilograms, then you need chemical B with a mass of Y kilograms.

But they didn't know about the periodic table, so they thought each element was a mix of different attributes; gas, water, fire, stone and ether. These would approximate to different parts of the periodical table.

a reply to: Miccey

Thanks for bringing it. Just off the cuff…

What his U of S research team has discovered is a process using a solution -- acetic acid combined with very small amounts of an oxidant and another acid -- that extracts gold efficiently and effectively without the environmental concerns of current industry practices.

Oxidation during processes implies a chemical reaction producing gasses, how they figure on recycling the solution afterwards is problematic, but okaaay, Ill wait till i can purchase it for fifty cents a litre.

Besides that the other reclamation and refining processes are still unchanged, the gold bearing material has to be ground, then milled to expose the most gold to solution as possible (10 seconds reaction time isn't very long).

The metallic elements then have to be separated from the plastic and other organics, by shakers and blowers.

The gold in solution then is plated out in a tank with electricity, cathode and anode.

Then finally, smelted in crucibles in the present of flux to purify the gold in an accredited refinery that produces fine gold bars with certification of purity.

Only then does your initial scrap pile become "gold" commanding current market prices.

The process of gold reclamation from electronics is toxic and only really worth it on an industrial level, the processes are tried and established, as toxic and wasteful as they are, because its GOLD, after all.

a reply to: awareness10

It's a nice dream i've thought about it too. But 'They' the greedy ones who run this rock wouldn't allow it to go far. Unless they controlled it like they dream of controlling everything else on Planet Z.

Right you are. I got out of recycling because they made the private refining part illegal, only allowing ttwo refineries here in the Valley to perform that on a minimal level. All the big lots go out of country to Miranda in Canada or to Mexico.

Used to be jewelry makers had small operations in home or business, but the EPA made that illegal, now scrappers get pennys on the dollar for e waste.

More metals are contained in a ton of circuit boards than any mine on earth. In south africa they mine @ 40 tons of ore to get an ounce of gold,

PCBs from computers have up to five ounces gold alone per ton of circuit board. Cell phones have almost two dollars of gold per unit.

People buy millions of cell phones, throwing away or trading in their obsolete models.

Long time scrapping of E waste has led me to realize the higher up the precious metals chain one goes the more greedy people become about 'the precious'. Unless you're greedy too, its a difficult business to make money in. The big refineries have the market all sown up, pretty much.

a reply to: intrptr

I know, there's not much left for good honest people to just exist making an honest living anymore.

No worries, the illusion will end, and then all of this will be meaningless my friend

I actually do this as one of my revenue generating business units. We do not use strong acids in our process. We use Thiosulfate which chelates the gold from the circuit boards. It is more benign for the environment and almost as efficient as cyanide at heavy metal chelation.

I doubt very much they will make the solution and then sell it. It says in the article they are looking for industry partners. So they will probably just go into business with a company themselves.

Old news. I did it before when gold was skyrocketing. The hard part is the nitric acid for your Aqua regia

No THIS isnt old news...
What YOU are doing or used to do IS...
Aqua Regia is the old soloution, this one
is new...

I have used Thiourea to recover gold from ores and electronic scrap.

There is also the thiosulfate leaching process for gold and silver extraction

And the Newbery-Vautin chlorination process for leaching gold

You can also leach gold with iodine or bromine.

The reason cyanide is used is its cheap and you can recover the gold on charcoal.
and the toxicity is very short lived as it breaks down quickly in sunlight and oxygen.

a reply to: Miccey

I have not yet found a single paper or patent on this process. It has been a frustrating and fruitless search. Anyone else have any luck nailing down some details of this process?