Things you need to know about gold recycling

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

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.

Make your own gold recycling business

Let’s write about recycling Gold from Electronic, Telecommunication & Computer Scrap. To find the gold keep your eyes and ears open. Don’t let to miss a chance to collect gold from scrap.

This post should give you simple guidelines how to collect scrap, sort all kind of electronics and recover gold from. To be successful in this business you need to keep your eyes and ears open.

Simply nut not easy enough. Make sure you know where gold is hidden and to find right price to pay for that kid a scrap. Also, important thing is to know the amount of gold in particular electronic device or part where you have gold plated parts.

For people doing this for a long time these values are well known but not if you are newbie.

Let’s take a look for mobile phones and try to figure out amount of gold inside these electronic devices - Some people saying that a bag of used mobile phones contains a gram of gold. There are a lot of mobile phones in the world, so how much of the gold we need can we get from them? This is the question everyone dealing with gold recycling business wants to know. Numbers can confuse some people, so let’s quote some text from experts saying about gold amount inside smartphones -

“There be gold in them thar smartphones”, said the European Commissioner for the Environment Janez Potocnik last month. He didn't use those exact words, but that was the general idea.
"The business case is clear," he said, as he launched revised waste and recycling targets for the EU.
"There's gold in waste - literally. It takes a ton of ore to get 1g of gold. But you can get the same amount from recycling the materials in 41 mobile phones."
This seems to be largely correct, whether the commissioner was talking about an imperial ton, or metric tons (one is 1,016kg, the other 1,000kg).

Take these facts and buy old smart phones with prices determined with global gold value at that time.

Now let’s see amount of gold in computer unit - When you buying CPU’s for recycling keep in mind that old ones contains much more gold per pound than new CPU’s. Also, as I shown on example before, low class and mid class CPU has less gold value per pound then high CPU class. These Intel Pentium vs Intel Celeron gives you real gold value per pound example.

To write more about gold inside processor chip - The processor is the brain of the PC. This means that every computer has one, and it contains plated pins. Some processors have high gold value per pound and some of them not. Older processors are generally larger and have more generous gold plating than more modern ones. For gold recycling business 386/486 and Pentium chips are particularly most valuable.

Process of recycling electronic scrap

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.

Celeron 3L9XP without gold inside - Don't bother

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.

For CPUs with gold follow these links

CELERON D with Gold
755 Intel with Gold inside

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.

How to get out gold from old computer?

Do you really think that it is possible to get out gold from old PC?

If we talk about getting gold from old PC, it is crucial to understand recycling factor in the whole story. That means that you can't buy expensive computers and electronic parts to get out gold from them. Instead, you need to get cheap material for recycling. For that manner, we are saying Old PC and thinking about computers which don't worth someone as they are.

Gold price all around globe has become main reason for recycling gold from any source people can think about. Old Computers can be rich with gold content and that is why are they so much wanted recycling material. Keep in mind, not any PC component is worth with gold. Forget about power units or main housing components made from plastic. Make sure to collect all CPUs, motherboards, RAM modules and other components with gold plated connectors.

To get more secure way of doing this kind a job take a look at the documentary on NGC how people collect all kind of raw materials and how they extract gold. In most cases they need to use hazard chemicals so be careful and let the professionals do that step. All you need to do is to collect gold plated components, broke them apart and take them to recycling plant in your area.

It is possible to do it at your home if you know what are you doing, but still it is important to know how dangerous that process can be.

For those people who don't want to deal with chemicals it is better way to take their scrap to someone who can do it in a professional way with right equipment.

On my further posts I will show some other cool examples of gold hidden inside electronic devices. In that way you can see where to look for gold and how to make money from it. Don't throw away old electronic devices, keep them instead and sell their gold content.

Beside gold maybe you can find silver or some other noble metal.

Wonder if there is gold inside CPU?

New CPUs are made using new technology with a less gold than old ones, but still there is gold inside them. To find that gold first you need to take CPU apart and to search for gold plated elements inside CPU housing unit.

How much gold you can find inside CPU?

Here are two examples of gold plated components inside modern CPU. To be honest, these CPUs are not so modern anymore but they are used even in these days. You can find gold in personal computers but not as many as that was case in lately 80’s or early 90’s.

First example shows you gold plated components inside Celeron D processor and second one shows you 755 socket Chip with gold inside. Both of these CPUs are broken and gold is easy to be noticed.

Production process become more precise and gold plating was made more accurate which means that CPU’s from early 2k year contain less gold per unit than it was case in a decade before.

However, if you want you can still find gold to recycle. Not as much as it was case before, but it is worth to try to recycle even these new Celeron, Pentium or AMD chip.

CPU is component which is made of significant amount of gold. Mostly gold is trapped inside CPU housing unit. To collect gold you need to break it part and to look for plated parts. After that it is easy to dissolve gold plated surface and collect pure gold.

Amount of gold depends on which processor we talking about. Some of them have more gold than others but one guideline stays and that is - Older processors have more gold than new ones.

For example - Cyrix Cx486 processor contain about 0.11 grams of gold inside. That means that you can find one gram of pure gold inside 10 CPU units. It is not bad for recycling them. Other example is Cyrix 586 processor which contains 0.25 grams of gold inside single unit. You need only 4 of these processors to make one gram of pure gold. Take a note and do the math. It is quite good to break them apart and to dissolve gold from them.

Today we know that most valuable processors are Pentium PRO with about 1 gram of gold inside and AMD-K5 PR133 which contains 0.5 grams of gold. This applies for single CPU unit.