How Gold Is Recycled is the question many people asking. In this post we will explain some basics about recycling process.
To get gold out of electronic scrap this is the first step - First thing you need to do is to sort out your waste in a way to know where to look for a gold materials. This step is important because it tells you exactly what percentage of the material contains valuable metals. Scrap containing gold is placed on a scale. This way you can weight and calculate amount of gold you can expect. By sorting electronic waste you have components that are disassembled and sorted based on their type. A detailed record is kept of what materials are present. Any valuable pieces are recorded. Because many recycled items also contain hazardous materials, these are also sorted. Environmentally harmful substances such as mercury are isolated and sent away for proper disposal. Once all valuable components have been sorted and weighed, they are ready for smelting.
Next thing to do in case of recycling is to melt gold plated components. Gold plated elements that can be recycled are melted using very high and controlled heat. This process is called "smelting." The metal turns to liquid as it is heated past its melting point. Gold is often mixed with other substances when used in electronics and other sources of scrap metal. Once it has melted into liquid form, however, it can be separated. Each metal has unique properties and densities. Smelting equipment uses these differences to separate and refine any metal of value.
Step three do final gold recycling step - Once you have made gold and other metals are melted, they can be re-formed as needed. The refined metal is shaped and cooled into standard sizes and weights. These gold units can then be re-used. Gold processing centers distribute the refined metal to factories to use as needed. Because of the refining and packaging process, recycled gold is as useful as the day it was mined, and can be used in electronics or jewelry once again.
There is significant amount of gold in consumer electronics. It is on you to find it and start recycling process.
Mostly we picture copper when thinking about how electricity is conducted, probably because it is the most common conductor. Silver is actually the best conductor, followed closely by gold. Yes you read it right, Gold is better conductor than copper is. Copper is cheaper than precious metals, but it’s also much slower in transporting electrons than its glamorous siblings. In the world of computing and communications, speed is more important than cost, which means that copper remains relegated to construction and pennies.
And as fast a conductor as silver is, it corrodes or tarnishes easily whenever it comes in contact with water, even with humid air. Corrosion is one of the things we don’t want inside our electronic devices.
Gold, on the other hand, is highly corrosion-resistant. In short word explanation - Gold is not as fast as silver, but it doesn’t fall apart like silver and is many times faster than copper. It is a best choice in producing precise electronic devices.
To learn more about gold and how it is removed from discarded devices, we are going to write a few words about using Gold in electronics and how to recycle those for getting it back
How much gold is in a smart phone? In very rough numbers, there are 10 troy ounces of gold, or about three-fifths of a pound, per ton of smart phones. Ten thousand phones weigh one ton. With gold selling for about $1,580 per ounce, that would yield $15,800.
How much gold we can find in laptop? Two hundred laptops would yield five troy ounces of gold. How much is in an average desktop? A PC circuit board, where the gold is, weighs about a pound. If you had a ton of those boards, you should have 5 troy ounces of gold. Are there manufacturers that use more gold than others? Computer makers don’t make their circuit boards because they are commodity items. They buy them from third parties. The trend in using gold among all of those companies is definitely down. It’s a costly material, so they are looking for more efficient ways to make the boards, trying to use as little gold as possible. How long does it take to get all the gold out? Individuals can take apart a smart phone easily by hand, but the volume of gold is going to be small. It’s not uncommon for a developing nation to accept all kinds of trash from developed nations, including electronics, in return for cash. Local entrepreneurs typically burn circuit boards and use cyanide on the ash to separate the gold. That’s not what anyone would call a green process, but it is a cottage industry because it gets the job done reasonably inexpensively. Some companies are using a mechanical process, shredding computer components to quarter-inch bits to liberate the plastic, aluminum, steel, gold and other materials to create commodity streams. Magnets grab the steel. Eddy currents are used to propel non-ferrous metals, including precious metals, from plastics.
Is shredding computers the best way to get at the gold? There are lots of interesting ideas for technologies that could possibly be better, but it’s hard to compete against developing nations that are manually breaking things down, often in environmentally unfriendly ways. Doing it almost any other way to protect the environment is going to be more expensive.
Well, these days, most of the things that you thought to be impossible are now possible. If you would like to get if you Gold in PC, it is totally possible these days. It is all about recycling gold from personal computer and even another computer scrap. These days, Gold in PC could be taken by taking apart the old computer that you have at home and make it sure that you could get rid of all the parts without any gold content within. Make it certain that you only need the components.
Mineral processing operation is one of the complex things to do in Nevada, as it uses roasting in each treatment that they use. At some point, Jerritt Canyon has been designed into the process of mild refractory and oxide gold ores by those of the traditional cyanidation making use of chlorine gas for per-oxidation of those refractory ores. In the year 1989, the roasting circuit has been added into the procedure for the treatment of those highly refractory ores that are now being processed and mined at the Jerritt Canyon. With such, the unit operations at Jerritt Canyon plant for the processing are being composed with different circuits.
Why don’t you consider taking apart the old computers that you have and make it sure that you get rid of the entire parts without even any sort of gold content within. You would only need the CPU, the motherboard cards, and the motherboard. The gold inside it has to be recycled. When you have already collected all of these parts, you should all take them apart and then collect any sort of golden particles within. For instance, if you would like to recycle your RAM stick, it would be essential for you to get rid of those golden pins right from the bottom of the stick.
If you would like to get gold in PC, you can try to recycle the network card. However, just make it sure that you cut off all of the pins that goes out into the PCI slot or with some other slot depending upon the kind of motherboard in which you are recycling. Once you have already separated the parts with the gold on it, ensure that you only get them all into a certain glass dish and prepare the aqua regia solution, which is a mixture for the extraction of gold. You can definitely use it, but you must be very aware that it is a hazardous kind of acids.
Some of the other people could actually make out a good kilo of gold from those of the broken and old personal computers. The sources for this value have to be big and yet a possible one. Gold is definitely hidden inside the components of the computer and there are just a lot within the motherboard. By mainly knowing a much better knowledge about gold, it could be easily extracted from the sources. The recycling procedure for the gold recycling is not a simple task and it has to be taken as a serious matter, most especially if you are thinking about on how to recycle gold.
Why do you think there is gold inside the motherboards?
Well, unlike the copper gold, it is an expensive kind of metal and there is definitely no need of real explanation about using god gold instead of taking copper. The motherboards have their copper within, yet Gold is also present in it as well. However, what is that supposed to mean? Well, with the fact that Gold is a noble kind of metal, it only means that it would never oxidize on the open air. Thus, it makes it a better component to use. This is one of the reasons why gold are being used for making out motherboards.
Gold is definitely a precious kind of metal. With such, everyone is thinking about how people are able to recover these gold pieces from the broken as well as old electronic materials. For most of the cases, the printed kind of circuit boards has simply the highest yield of this gold. Thus, you should know the differences between those of the low grade and higher grade kinds of boards. Keep in mind that the low grade kind of board doesn’t really contain gold in amount that you could find inside the high grade kind of boards. The main different between such boards is the amount of gold that they have.
If you think you have wide amount of electronic waste materials, it would be a good deal for you to start recycling gold and any other precious materials from these things. The process of recycling could be a little dangerous for the reason that it isn’t really worth a try without any sort of enough electronic waste materials. If you consider start using up small picks as well as tweezers, you should strip the entire metal out from the board. Keep in mind that this metal has a gold content and other kind of precious metals inside. The amount of these metals that you could find could be a little hard to separate using bare hands.
Some other methods for recycling could be a little less dangerous, yet they could not be that effective as well. It actually depends upon your knowledge and skills for such type of job and on what kind of method you are using. The places for finding all of the gold besides the PC boards could be with cell phones and they could be a good source of gold. The cellphones are mainly another thing wherein you could find these precious metals and somewhat easy to find since people often changes these devices. Mobile phones could be easy to recycle and there’s not much of waste and handling that would be easier than handling old motherboards.
Do you have any idea about what gold bullion is?
Well, it is actually a valuable kind of precious metal, which is mostly made from either silver or gold. Such gold bullions actually come in two main forms like coins, bars and others. The value of these bullions mainly comes from the precious metals in which they are made of. Unlike those of the numismatic coins or jewelry, Gold Bullion does not have any sort of artistic component or value. There are bullions available in different sizes and its weight could be in between kilos or grams. Well, bar would always be heavier.
Many relevant web portals writing about Apple and gold recycling process this company is using.
Did you know that Apple recovered one ton of gold by recycling iPhones just in one year?
By stripping down old iPhones, iPads and Macbooks, Apple recovered huge quantities of precious metals. Apple has revealed it reclaimed almost one metric tonne of gold by recycling its own products in 2015. At current prices, that's equivalent to around £28 million worth of gold. This is not quantity you can expect by collecting electronic devices but it could be good motivation story.
These valuable materials were reclaimed through the Apple Renew scheme, which lets customers hand in their worn-out Apple devices in exchange for money off future Apple purchases. Some of the recycling is done by Apple's line of prototype 'Liam' robots, which are designed to take apart old Apple devices while detecting and separating their valuable elements. Electronics companies don't put gold in their devices just to be extravagant - the metal is used in computer components because it's an excellent conductor, and doesn't tend to corrode or oxidize in the same way as copper or aluminum. The Environmental Report also revealed other areas in which Apple is trying to reduce its carbon footprint - the sleek packaging for the iPhone 6S is 20 per cent lighter and 34 per cent smaller than the box the first-generation iPhone came in. Additionally, all of the company's data centers - which power services like iMessage, Siri and FaceTime - run on renewable energy, and Apple's carbon emissions have fallen every year since 2011, from 137.2kg of CO2 per product to 114.2 in 2015.
These reports could give us a clue of gold quantity inside Apples devices. If you are thinking of this business seriously take a time to calculate worth of old Apples devices. Hope you will find this post interesting and useful for starting gold recycling business.
First of all we need to warn you that process described on this blog involves highly corrosive and toxic chemicals and should only be done outside or in a fume hood. To recover gold from Electronic scrap you need to use safety gear such as Gloves, goggles and a respirator.
This tutorial describes how to recover the Gold Plating from those fingers.
First thing you need to do is to cut the fingers off the collected cards. Best way to do that is to use secateurs. Another good mechanical way would be to use a dedicated PCB Guillotine. No matter which way you prefer, the goal is to cut the fingers as close as possible to the edge of the Gold Plating. That way you have already removed parts without gold on them.
Mostly gold plating thickness on fingers is approximately 30 microinches (0.762 Micron), though it is not that uncommon to find thinner plating on cheaper Chinese made electronics. On the other hand, military and aerospace applications may require thicker plating. The usual purity of Gold used in contacts is 99.7%. Typical yield would 1.2-2.5 grams of pure gold per lb, depending on the scrap quality.
Process we are going to describe is useful for whole boards.
Stripping the Gold - way to do it…
The complete mechanism of the copper chloride etching process is actually quite complicated and quite boring as well. However there are three key ingredients which drive the stripping process of gold plating and are important to remember and sustain: A. Free HCl B. CuCl2 presence C. Dissolved Oxygen.
As you can see in the video below, the fingers are placed in a plastic strainer and fitted in a matching plastic pot. For larger quantities (say 2-10 lb), two 5 gal plastic buckets could be used, placing one inside the other, where the inner bucket is drilled with many holes at the bottom. No matter what you use, the point is to be able to lift the fingers and leave the solution behind.
A simple plastic tube connected to a small aquarium pump will work just fine. The other end is placed under the strainer with the fingers so that the bubbles will rise up through the fingers.
The fingers are then covered with Hydrochloric acid (HCl) 30-32%. The acid can be diluted a bit with water if needed, but do not exceed 2:1 V/V (acid/water) ratio. Small amount of Copper Chloride solution is then added to the solution.
The bubbling action from the pump will keep the solution aerated and agitated.
The Copper ions (2+) and dissolved Oxygen are basically the oxidizing reagents which produce a soluble Copper and Nickel salts, etching it from underneath the gold plating. The HCl acts as a “receptor” which holds the oxidized Copper and Nickel in solution.
The color of the solution will get dark green and eventually darken toward black as more and more Copper and Nickel dissolves into the solution.
The stripping process can last anywhere from 24 hours to a week. This depends on temperature, amount of free acid, aeration rate and level of agitation.
Treating the Gold foils - How to do that?
When determined that the stripping process have been completed, the fingers are removed and washed in a bucket of water to collect all of the clinging gold foils.
We suggest you to wash the foils in clear fresh water. This way you can see what’s going on. Don’t wash off the foils in the original etch solution.
When all of the foils are removed, set the fingers aside to dry out completely - and we mean it - Completely.
Collect those foils and join it to the next batch
In the meanwhile, all of the foils are collected in a filter. It is important to filter the solution and the wash water since sometimes the foils are so this it will break apart into gazillion of tiny part which doesn’t settle easily.
To make the filtration process as quick as possible, let the both the Copper Chloride etching solution and the wash water to stand overnight. Then pour to the filter only the supernatant and let it drain completely, same for the wash water.
The foils and powder and the rest of the junk is filtered since tiny particles has a habit of clogging up filters.
Keep the wash water and the main etching solution separate as the etching solution is reusable. Diluting the etching solution with water will most likely precipitate solid Copper (I) Chloride.
Once all of the foils are collected in the filter, you can choose to either treat the filter and the foils as it is with Aqua Regia or incinerate it first. The latter is preferable though, if not done right, you can blow away some of your hard earned gold foils.
For one or two filters, it is easy enough to just digest everything with hot Aqua Regia.
To incinerate the filter papers, let it dry or at least reach a damp state. Put it in a stainless steel pan and heat the pan from below with a torch. As the paper heats up it will slowly burn away. Slowly, collect the ashes and smudge it into one pile, keep heating the pan to red hot and keep it like that until you see no more smoldering remains. Do not blow the torch directly at the ashes because it could be blown off with gold content inside.
Final step is - Dissolving the Gold
Dissolving gold process is fairly simple if you have done some recovery and refining before. The foils with the ashes or the unburned filters are placed in an open mouth beaker and covered with a dilute HCl solution (50/50 32%HCl/water) and heated to medium heat (120-160F). When the solution is quite hot, a small amount of nitric acid is added to the solution. No more than 3ml per each lb of fingers we started with.
The solution will gain distinctive yellow color as the gold and traces of copper goes into the solution. The dissolution process should be done under a fume-hood and the beaker must be covered with a watch glass. Also be aware, the Gold solution must not be boiled. Dissolution process will be over in less than 30 minutes, there’s really no need for more than that. When done, the solution is allowed to cool back down to room temperature and then filtered into a clean beaker for precipitation.
Why is it so attractive? Well the reason is that gold is high value noble metal, and the high cost of mining for gold gives us enough reason to recycle this noble metal.
According to the World Gold Council, recycled sources accounted for about 1,370 metric tons of gold in 2013, or roughly one-third of total global production. This is significant amount of gold in global scale, and it has diagram line keep going up and forward.
While recycling of gold jewellery is high dependent upon market conditions and prices for the metal, the electronics industry is a steady source of recyclable gold-containing waste. We all need to know that production process for making electronics needs gold without asking for price.
Computer circuit boards, cell phone boards, contact pins, integrated circuits and various other electronic components all contain minute amounts of gold that, if effectively collected, can be processed to extract gold as well as other precious and base metals. Gold is gold, whoever use it and it has value depended on global market status.
Once electronic or other gold-containing scrap material is collected, it must be pre-processed in order to remove unwanted parts that are often made with plastic and composite materials, which could affect the chemical recycling process.
The next step is to identify and sort material depending on purity and the presence of certain impurities, particularly hazardous or regulated substances.
Proper identification of materials and recognition of composition is critical not only to ensuring that the recycling process is profitable, but also those hazardous materials such as cadmium or mercury are properly treated and disposed.
Gold contained in electronic waste is often categorized as:
Very high grade - gold content with a minimum of 400ppm
High grade - gold content with a minimum 200ppm
Medium grade - gold content with a minimum of 100ppm
Low grade - gold content with a minimum content of 50ppm
Very low grade - gold content with a maximum content of 50ppm
Methods of sorting include spectrometry analysis, sample taking and electrolysis.
Assays are produced that indicate the quantity and purity of gold as well as any other credits for precious metal like silver or platinum. The assay is used to settle accounts between suppliers and the recycling facility.
Depending on the form, grade and composition of the source material, gold can be recovered through various methods. These are expertise and you should leave them to the experts.
Just to mention each one, keep reading this article: Burning with high heat can isolate gold from the other components. This method is very simple in that the gold can be collected while other un-wanted materials are burned off as fumes. However, the presence of toxic and heavy metals in many electronics can make this a dangerous method and, so, it is rarely used in commercial operations. Cyanide leaching is one of the easiest, most cost effective and toxic methods for extracting gold. The process involves immersing the electronic devices in a solution containing cyanide. Cyanide is element which interacts with gold, forming gold ions, which can then be distilled into gold dust or gold powder. The powder can then be collected and melted into gold bullion at near 99 percent purity. This method is often employed in developing countries, as a cheap and quick way to extract valuable gold from electronic components. Health and environmental concerns spurred by the use of cyanide leaching in developing countries have resulted in the Basel Convention addressing the trans-border movement of electronic waste. Aqua regia is a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids. These acids have the ability to dissolve gold. Nitric acid reacts with gold to oxidize and strip it from other metals like silver, copper, and nickel, allowing these to be collected for recycling. In order to stop the oxidizing process and precipitate the gold from the mixture, hydrochloric acid must be added. Now, the gold molecules can be collected and filtered. The recovered gold is washed with acetone and water before being cast as solid gold. A more complicated method to recover gold involves reverse electroplating. This process involves creating an electrolytic cell in order to 'win' back gold via electrolysis, effectively reversing the process of electroplating the gold onto the electronic component.
Gold recycling process and precious metal recycling - All about recycling raw materials for getting gold and other precious metal.
What you need to know about precious metal recycling? Recycling process has been an experienced through past when buyer of precious metals have been buying copper and aluminum. Today, there are many companies buying these common precious metals like gold, silver, platinum and palladium. Also, these companies will most likely buy other rare precious metals. Prices are confirmed by world trading market locally and nationally. Give you a try and become a miner who can find gold in scrap most people just throw away.
Gold is number one precious metal in world trading circles. U.S. jewelry is usually found in 10k gold (.416%), 14k gold (.583%) and 18k gold (.750%). All these jewelry you can collect and extract pure gold from. If don’t know how, then it is better to collect them and sell to your local gold recycling dealer.
Silver is second most common precious metal you can find in jewelry. To produce silver from silver coins, silver jewelry, electrical silver contacts, sterling silver (92.5 % or .925 %) and other silver items make sure to collect raw material and give it to experts dealing with silver extraction.
Platinum jewelry and other platinum items you can sell also.
Other precious metal information – Along with gold and silver there is palladium which is well known precious metal known today. For palladium recycling just collect catalytic converters from most modern vehicles.
On many occasions we already mentioned electronic recycling process but in short steps. This article should provide you more precise and detailed step by step procedure for collecting and recycling electronic scrap.
Step by step recycling chain for electronic scrap consists of various actions you must take care for. In short way, these are steps required: collection, dismantling, shredding, and end-processing of the various materials and metals.
Each step requires experienced specialists with dedicated technologies. If you are not familiar with technologies we mentioned, it is smart thing to do to hire company with experience and technology needed. First 3 steps can be done by anyone with basic knowledge, but the last step requires special techniques and should be done by specialized company dealing with recycling electronic scrap. Last step is the crucial one, which makes the physical recovery of metals back into their pure metallic form. If we speak about environmental impact of recycling process, we must understand how important is to make this process Eco-friendly as much as possible. Transformation of circuit boards and other materials into precious metals, copper and other base and special metals forms is a process we all need, but not with any price.
Any individual which wants to recycle electronic scrap wants to know gold, silver and other metal content inside some scrap categories.
Lets try to answer that question - These are typically categorized into different qualities, depending on their gold content:
very high grade: gold content of minimum 400 ppm
high grade: gold content of minimum 200 ppm
medium grade : gold content of minimum 100 ppm
low grade: gold content of minimum 50 ppm
very low grade: gold content lower than 50 ppm
HINT: Remove large Al/Fe-parts but be careful, especially in case of shredding and sorting, not to lose valuable (precious) metals in side streams. For high and medium grade boards avoid pre-treatment and ship them as they are.
Each recycling process consists of the following operations and services:
Weighing and sampling collected materials - This make sure that material is accurately weighed and sampled. If you have weigh materials right then you can calculate their value more precise. Providing correct weights, moisture content and representative samples for assaying provides numbers to get accurate gold or silver percentage. Besides that, with materials like electronic scrap that contains hazardous substances, precise determination of the material composition is a prerequisite of environmentally sound treatment.
Smelting and refining process - Most recycling companies uses a standardized metallurgical flow sheet, based on copper, lead and nickel as collector metals to secure high recovery yields for all precious metals and numerous other metals. Any plastics or organic residues contained in the input materials are also utilized as a reducing agent and partly as a fuel substitute.
Recycling process can be different from one company to another but they all do the same finish. Extracting gold or some other precious metal. While doing that, many other metals and non metal elements are collected and mostly they all can be recycled for further production process.
If you read my blog then you could notice some broken CPU chip I have show you to see gold in them. This Celeron 3L9XP has shown as not worth at all for recycling.
I broke this CPU as well and find out that there is no gold content inside. Take a look at those pictures and see that there is no gold on the surface.
However you can still collect these CPU for recycling gold from outside small pin surface. There is no enough gold for you to buy these CPUs but if you can get them for free it is worth to collect them and recycle for gold later.
