Turning E-Waste Into Cash! Smelting Gold & Silver From Circuit Boards
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- Опубликовано: 13 июн 2023
- In this video we explore the steps in recycling and processing scrap e-waste and printed circuit boards to recover the precious and base metals. We'll take you through the process of using an MBMM hammer mill and shaker table to efficiently extract and concentrate the valuable metals and precious metals.
By subjecting the e-waste and circuit boards to our crushing and separation processes, we are able to remove the waste, plastic, and fiberglass, leaving behind concentrated metals. These concentrated materials are then smelted down to a more manageable form, making it easier to recover the precious metals they contain.
In this video, we explore different techniques and discuss ideas for a simple, cost-effective, and efficient way to recover the precious metals from the smelted concentrates. Join the conversation and share your insights to help us develop innovative solutions for maximizing metal recovery.
Don't miss out on this exciting journey into e-waste recycling and the pursuit of sustainable metal recovery. Stay tuned for valuable insights, expert tips, and our ongoing commitment to environmental stewardship.
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Keywords: e-waste recycling, printed circuit boards, valuable metals, precious metals, MBMM hammer mill, shaker table, metal extraction, metal recovery, smelting, sustainable recycling, environmental stewardship
Hashtags: #EWasteRecycling #MetalExtraction #PreciousMetals #SustainableRecycling #EnvironmentalStewardship #MBMM 
Наука
I hope he sends this to Sreetips instead of the other Florida guy that complained throughout his video and was condescending about the comments in his videos.
Agreed. He needs to partner with streetips. Fact
I have yet found a youtuber that is as good as Sreetips.
Most have stopped making content or it is very infrequent.
Some really useful info on sreetips videos.
I seen that video. Hopefully he doesn’t buy it. I would of loved to see him do something with streetips as well. Maybe we need to start commenting on his videos lol
😂😂😂 Mike’s videos are funny.
I really like your approach to this Jason. eWaste is a global problem and you're willing to work with anyone and share as much as you can with the world. It's just a problem that needs solving, no politics, no borders, no corporate greed, no egos, just a problem to solve and anyone is welcome to participate.
ewaste is not a problem because it's a resource. to source out material from scrap isn't as harmful for environment as mining I would say.
Hi Jason! I've been enjoying your videos for a while now, but this one really peaked my interest. I'm a semi-retired inorganic chemist at UW down in Seattle, and have done some separations of dissolved metals (Cu and Ni mostly). I started looking the chemical literature about e-waste and metal separations and found some recent papers on green techniques involving amino acids to separate copper from the other metals in e-waste. It might save you having to breathe those nasty Nitric acid fumes (I know I've breathed my share) and some of the waste disposal problems. Let me know if you'd like to discuss it sometime.
This is interesting id love to read those papers! There is so much to be learned as this is a new budding business worth billions of dollars.
Is it the one with Bromine?
I have read about the paper but cannot find the paper itself. It sounds highly interesting.
Sreetips is the man for this. You, Dan Hurd, Brett @ Cerro Gordo and Sreetips is my full circle. You 4 are awesome and would love to see y'all @ Cerro Gordo in a vid.
Sreetips doesn’t refine copper though and has zero interest in doing so. Trust me I’ve already talked to him about it many times. I collect the copper from my refining wastes and electrolytically purify it and reuse if for my refining. I’ve tried to convince him to do the same since he’s basically is only two steps away from doing so, but for him, he’d rather purchase new copper then collect and refine new copper. It’s not worth his time, but I don’t think he realizes how much money is to be made with copper and it doesn’t take much more effort than he already puts in to complete the circle of life so to speak.
@@djcbanks copper is still part of Sreetips process though. to precipitate the silver from the acids.
@Guilty Pleasures it would be cool if he did. Full circle is right.
@@bretcalobeer5152 would be sweet to see him pull it from solution.
Correct. He then drops the copper out of solution using iron. But I seem to recall that he just treats the copper sponge as waste. @@bretcalobeer5152
Sreetips is the best channel I have seen for small scale chemical refining. Not sure how it will scale up to industrial levels as he uses a lot of Hydrochloric, Nitric, and other acids.
Hello Jason, I am an electrical engineer who design PCBs. I just wanted to thank you for your work and hopes you becomes very sucessful in this endeavour.
Hi Jason, Love your determination! Great video! Thumbs up! I've always gone the acid route. Tin is the enemy! It does not play nice with gold! That's why I de-populate the boards, separate the good from the bad components (all the capacitors are worthless) and then soak the good stuff in HCL to get rid of the tin & the steel. I'm currently designing an electrowinning process to get the copper, silver, & gold. Any remaining sludge can be sent to a commercial refiner for the PGM's. Stay safe, Jim
This is the way
Will it scale up though? Would it be more economical to smelt the base metals out first, or dissolve with acid? I'm planning on making my own nitric and recapturing the off gassed nitric oxide, which should keep the costs under control. But I also have access to most of the smelting chemicals for free or very cheap from other recycled materials.
MLCCs are NOT necessarily worthless. Non-magnetic MLCCs have either silver or palladium electrodes. Some of the weakly magnetic MLCCs do as well.
Then there are the tantalum capacitors, which also tend to have silver electrodes.
The FOIL capacitors and canister capacitors are just aluminum. I do melt the canister ones, in a cast iron incineration/melt tube (using firewood, which costs me nothing) and recover about 40% by original capacitor weight of aluminum. It's cool when the canister capacitors explode. ;]
@Alondro77 do you have a video of your setup
@@tommyverducci I do not.
A friend of mine used to work for a company in California that recycled e-waste. He told of literal rivers of pur gold. Explained that the process had to do with precise melting points and super fine powder feeding the system. This was back in the late 80s. Always thought it sounded really cool to see rivers of metal.
Maybe he was selling a pyramid scheme.
@markae0 He wasn't selling anything. I even saw some pictures of him and some other people with several metal bars in a jail cell looking room. This was back when Americans did their own dirty work and kept all the money and assets. Now we ship it out as trash and let other countries make the money and gain assets. California in particular shut his facility down because it emmited too much co2 or some other shit. So several hundred people lost thier job and the e-waste went to south America where kids pick through it for pennies of value to eat.
Pyramid of gold
Selective melting process, it is difficult to do with e scrap.
@@uncommonlogic1698 Sounds like a high...very high temp fractional distillation
I've got a bit of engineering background in this field, and from what I know your options are to either incrementally heat the crucible so that certain metals melt while others remain solid, or to look into leaching. There may be other options involving floatation and gravity separation but you'd have to grind much finer which is challenging when dealing with native metals
The problem with melting at different temps is that liquid metals tend to dissolve other metals. There is some new research on leaching using calcium chloride I'm interested in looking into. But I think electrowinning the copper from a smelted mix will make the precious metal refining easier.
Timothy Gorman and alienrocketscience, you both bring up great points I hadn't considered! My only experience with incremental heating systems are with lead and zinc systems which there are industry applications for. Perhaps electrowinning the copper and then cyanide leaching the gold may be the best option. Though I'm unsure if the cyanide will interact with other metals. Suppose if the cyinide is selective to both gold and silver you could still sell that product. Let me know your thoughts.
@@justinliakos9031 I'm just starting to get comfortable with the idea of smelting and using acids, it would take me some more time to consider using cyanide leaching.
I have done a little reading on calcium chloride leaching, but the paper was a little too technical for me. It sounds like a high copper content is a good thing for calcium chloride leaching, and it can be done fairly quickly at room temperature. I think processes requiring the least amount of safety measures and containment would be the most attractive for a small to mid-scale processor.
Sreetips is a good shout, he is familiar with acid baths and the science behind it. Love the videos you do keep it up mate.
My suggestion:
1) Remelt several times with KNO3 qnd borax to get rid of Sn, Zn, Pb and other base metals to get an alloy of Cu, Ag, Au and PGMs
2) Pour shots out of this alloy ->surface
3) Construct a copper cell similar to the silver cell from sreetips but way larger
4) you get pure copper and the residual "slimes" are a high grade mix of Cu, Ag, Au and PGMs
4) Treat these with diluted HNO3 to extract Cu and Ag, filter and cement out the Ag with Cu. Some PGMs will follow the Ag.
5) Melt the cemented Ag into shots and run through a silver cell *-> see sreetips) to get pure Ag. Collect the residual slimes and treat them with HNO3 (step 4)
6) Treat the residual solids from step 4) with Aqua regia, drop the Au with SMB and pour the residual liquid into the stockpot (see sreetips) to recover all traces of precious metals
7) Refine the Au with Aqua regia and drop with SMB. Take care to remove as much of AgCl with cooling and diluting (with ice) before filtering and dropping with SMB (see my videos or sreetips).
Never do acid washes on the product of step 2). The precious metal are to low concentrated and will result to go colloidal during an acid wash and will be lost.
AND....! You loose Au on your shaker table. Gold foils which defoliated from pins or plastic surfaces when shredding are just some microns thick and have a huge surface and will be washed away.
Remedy: shred the already shredded material again and use a much finer screen.
I would not shred at all, nor would I process the entire circuit board in the mix. There's a lot of junk metal on circuit boards that just creates a big mess and adds extra, unnecessary steps to an already laborious refining process. I'm 100% in agreement with 'golder70' on the shaker table thing! You're likely losing a lot of gold, just like panners lose gold simply looking for nothing but shiny gold particles in their pans and tossing the rest aside. Not all gold looks shiny like gold! I would first remove the 'fingers' from the circuit boards, along with any 'other' obvious clean looking gold-plated items for the first run of refining... saving the really nasty, curious, copper and other non-gold/silver looking junk, on the rest of the board, for a totally different method(s) of processing... if you later feel as though it is actually worth your time, effort and expense to mess with. I personally stay away from computer scrap because the yield of Ag and Au are extremely low, and I personally have no cheap source from which to obtain such cheap, profitable electronic scrap. The best 'average yield' you can expect from gold fingers alone will be about .001 grams of pure gold for every 1 gram of unprocessed finger, give or take. That being said, it would take on average, about 70 pounds of good, clean fingers alone to extract an average of one ounce of gold... plus the cost of the chemicals and lots, and 'lots' of labor required if done in small batches. If I had a really cheap source from which I could obtain this kind of scrap, Sure. I'd go for it, but most folks currently want to sell their electronic scrap for waayyy more money than it's worth. More power to them!
From what I've read, you use acid to break up colloidal solutions. And the amount that you would lose to suspension would be so low, it wouldn't be worth worrying about the loss. As for foils, I think he's had his tailings analyzed in one of these videos, and didn't have any precious metals in them.
Usually gold foils plated on kovar or copper, so I don't think it will be lost during crushing and shaking table process, it will not come as foils with large surface it will come as copper or kovar density, kindly correct me if am wrong
Sreetips on RUclips does a great job of explaining refining gold and silver. He would also help with copper when he is dealing with cleaning his waste solutions.
Nice video Jason. My best guess for the color difference in the melted samples is that copper melts at 1984 F and zinc boils at 1665 F so one sample was heated up and exposed to the air longer so that more of the zinc boiled off. Which is why it is so important to use a respirator while melting this stuff. Have a great day.
All of these processes are viable depending on your energy abilitys. In my case processing 100 lbs a week of high grade Ewaste. Even with the price of pure copper silver and gold it's hard to achieve any cost benefits without a method that includes chemistry and smelting. As you are aware these are achievable but need scale to achieve benefits that out way the costs... Thank you for everything you do for us
@@haiceid Are you being limited by energy consumption or sourcing of the ore?
I would suggest smelting it in the forge after the first step. then cornflaking the smelted metal. That will get rid of the steel and plastics. then use nitric acid to get rid of everything but the gold. You then put the imbedded acid in a put with copper plates so any silver falls out. If you want the copper then replace the copper plates with iron so the copper falls out.
what I came here to say
That would be too expensive because it takes loads of nitric to get all the copper.
Dissolving copper takes 4 times as much nitric as dissolving silver and there is a lot of copper in that mix.
Better to get all or most of the copper out with electrowhinning before starting with acids.
@@Landogarner83 First depopulate the boards that don't have any obvious gold flashing on traces. Basic motherboards have virtually no PMs at all on the board itself. Any PMs will be in the components. Saves a HUGE amount of resources processing only the components.
@@Alondro77 depopulating by hand reduces the cost of refining, but adds a lot to the up front labor.
@@timothygorman2846 Eh, I do it while streaming shows. Keeps the mind active while watching schlock. ;D
I think what your doing as a think tank with the community working together to find the best way to refine this material is amazing. You have a great channel, and I truly believe you're into conservation as much as the thrill of prospecting. Im sure you make your money off selling your grinders and shaker tables. But you have a knack and passion for showing the world your passion of prospecting and refining. Especial refining! Good luck with your future, ill keep watching.
I just wanted to add: If you take the board and heat them with a hot air gun and then whack them against something, all the components will fall off + a lot of the solder. The solder can also be scooped up and refined for tin + lead + silver.
THIS
small cement mixer and a blow torch
or an old washing machine drum .you could spin out the solder
On a small scale, it might help a lot to depopulate the boards, which you can do really fast with an air chisel. Then, depending on how detailed you'd want to get sorting things you could really get some results. Most of the lead/tin would stay with the board I think. Some people say there's some silver in that solder. If you had a big pile of IC chips, you could really get some nice results. Big pile of tantalum capacitors, Big pile of plastic holders full of gold plated pins. Pick out all the extruded aluminum heatsinks and such and those have some decent scrap value on their own. Don't forget, with acids, there's no face mask that will protect from nitric acid fumes. Permanent lung damage.
Today's lead-free solder have a varied percentage of the following:
Copper
Tin
Silver
Nickel
Zinc
Bismuth
Antimony
there are some specialist gas mask filters for NOx
You can recapture the nitric oxide and flow it through water to make nitric acid again.
I high grade everything before refining.. clean in clean out is obviously much easier than a mishmash of metals that need to be likely chemically separated then refined to purity.
I believe you hit most of the methods small timers would use.
One thing for sure.. the
Electronic Recycling Gold Rush is ON!
Thanks much Jason
Peace Prospector Tripp
I believe your #1 concentrates from the shaker table should go through another round of grinding to achieve the finest granule size possible, followed by another separation on a secondary shaker table that is calibrated for much finer and DIVERSE density separation. Once you start smelting, separation becomes much harder.
I 100% agree Sreetips is the best. A true wealth of knowledge
the shaker table of your channel is so satisfying. i wonder how many times you have explained how the table works? thousands! love this channel
I like how this channel is all, "I'm gonna try something new and refine my metals." And then all the sudden chemistry is just part of the normal process. Props for learning new stuff and immediately applying to reality.
If the bar you have is mostly copper then removing that and leaving behind the other metals is probably a good start. I would think an electricity based process would be clean and efficient compared to pure chemical processes. Set up a cathode and anode with copper sulphate as the electrolyte. You'll end up with pure copper and whatever is left at the bottom of the cell will be precious metals, base metal contaminants, and various rare earth metals.
From there a small scale chemical process could separate the PGMs.
I think you do so electromechanical separation even before then. Most of those metals can be somewhat separated using Eddy currents.
Once you have your factions, then on to your described method. All of the refining methods work so much better with a cleaner product.
I was going to leave the same comment but see youve already left it.
After some tries, since this video was posted, I can safely say that removing the copper from the contents takes an aweful lot of time through electrolysis.
Since there is so much of it, I am exploring electrowinning other metals and LEAVING the copper behind. In theory should be faster but also has more chemicals involved (vs Copper , which needs a medium strenght electrolyte).
@@christianabela6405
Definitely interesting and I appreciate the update.
@@laughingachilles I am currently studying and trying some stuff written in the book: "Practical Methods of Electrochemistry - byF.Mollwo Perkin
It sustains that the amperage employed on electrolytes is of fundamental importance since different metals will deposit at different amp settings. Thats promising so far. will keep updates...
Since the majority of your sample is copper you should consider a electrolytic copper cell. This would result in pure copper and leave the PM and junk in the slimes. Then you could move to a acid refining to recover the PM's
He could do a silver cell type set up and just take the e-waste directly from the shaker tables and but them in a filter lined basket with a heavy electrode on top of them. Experiment to get the right current and voltage for his cell set up to remove just the copper first such as .33 volts at whatever amps. Then he could use the cheapest solar panels he can find to do most of the work for him over time. Then like you said smelt and cupel the slimes for all the precious metals.
I was also thinking electrolysis would be the best way to get good separation
Exactly what I had wanted to write.
Sorry for all the comments, but i think you should send the bar to Sreetips as a surprise! And tell him to open it in a video! I want to see his reaction and process of recovering and refining.
Streetips was one of my first thoughts also when I saw where Jason was going with this. 👍
I know Sreetips isnt a fan of low yields, blah blah blah, but it would make a good video or series.
He won’t mess with copper.
Sreetips is the biggest boss that ever won and will be. But why don't you Cupel with lead
I tried more physical separation, the specific gravities of the non oxidized metals are too close for a blue bowl to effectively separate. I was reading up on another system that uses tubes with upward flowing water to separate different materials.
I'm planning on making my own nitric acid with the high voltage process that takes nitrogen out of the atmosphere, converts it to nitric oxide, then you flow it through water to form nitric acid. Cody's Lab has a video on that process.
Then I'm planning on using the electrowinning processes, and make multiple cells. But I've also considered selling dore bars to refiners.
Absolutely STUNNING video.
VERY much RESPECT..........!
Been fallowing a long time. All respect Jason. Great job on mixing the old with new videos .. for anyone that doesn’t fallow you have to go back to find the videos. Trust me. He’s very smart and business minded. Gotta give credit to him. Again, always a thanks Jason. I live vicariously 🤝👍.. gotta see S&J Forest Products. His other channel
I think it is great to see you make the common mistakes that us amateurs would make if we did on own great presentation.
All of these processes are viable depending on your energy abilities. In my case processing 100 lbs a week of high grade E Waste. Even with the price of pure copper silver and gold it's hard to achieve any cost benefits without a method that includes chemistry and smelting. As you are aware these are achievable but need scale to achieve benefits that outway the costs for small batch... Thank you for everything you do for us
Mr Sreetips. He's so polite and knowledgeable . I sure hope he can at least give advice. He's very busy as it is but he seems like a helpful guy
Jason, I've looked at a lot of different approaches. I like yours the best.
been waiting for this video! talk about something that grabs my attention. the way u called it ore made so much sense
This is super fascinating! Keep up the good work!!!
Love it! You continue to bring great content that's informative & clear while raising the same questions I have. 👍 keep up the great work!!
Stuff I never thought about until this popped up on my feed. I am truly fascinated by this video. I new gold was used a lot . Had no idea how many metals went into this process.
Thanks for trying this.. Glad to see it.. I can't help but I can really appreciate the effort and wish you success
You are a true pioneer.
Dude im super jelpus pf the equipment and just the entire operation u got goin here. Lucky man. Keep it up brotha.
Tu as parfaitement raison il y plus d or dans ces déchets électroniques que dans dans certaines mines . J adore tes vidéos et j apprend beaucoup de chose grâce à toi .
dude your awesome.. its people like you that advance society
I dig the video clips, about to start recovering metals myself.
I agree with the people saying you should strip the components off the boards. Isolating the obviously gold-plated parts would help a great deal, I imagine. I wonder what you could find at the patent office? Maybe some patented processes could give you some directions to go. The only thing coming into my mad scientist's mind is a centrifuge that could withstand high temperatures, and good luck with that, lol! Good luck with your efforts, you've bitten off a big one with this stuff.
Glad to see those valuable resources being recycled here in the United States 👍
Hello Jason. I really like your idea for doing small batches of this e-waste. I do not know enough about smelting to try a sample. Keep us posted please!
I am in the process of collecting ewaste. I live 2 blocks from a scrap yard that buys precious metals.
Plus I live at a prime spot within the rust belt to where I have access to ewaste and chemicals..
I am definitely taking all this in right.
Very cool Jason. I've been following your channel a few years but have rarely (edit) piped up before. I don't have the knowledge or gear to participate, but you deserve big props for what you are doing here. I get kinda eye rolly when I hear eco warriors going on about the 3 Rs and emission reduction. They never get involved in finding solutions though, they just wave placards and chain themselves to stuff. I wish you and your mad scientist followers success.
Says you've already posted 8 comments and got a heart from him so that's a lie
@@Lunch_box thanks for checking lunchbox...if that is your real name.
@@Lunch_box He said he rarely piped up, not never. Pretty low key for watching for years
@@stephenwalton8507 it is my real name tho
@@Lunch_box _Says you've already posted 8 comments and got a heart_
What _says_ that?
Please do a follow up to this video. Really interested to see how you get on separating the metals and seeing if it’s viable on a small scale! Thanks
Something to be aware of, I believe with Xray scanning gold can sometimes be mistaken for lead and vice versa depending on the concentration and form. You really need a scanner that can display the peaks discovered and see if they really line up with the target metal on its emission scale.
As far as separation goes, I have mixed emotions about melting everything into a blob, then trying to separate it chemically. your feed material coming out the mill has enough surface area that if you start with your lower cost acids first, they will chew away at lead, tin, copper, and aluminum, and leave your precious metals alone... with maybe the exception of silver. At least silver if it's in a nitrate form you can recover it by putting metallic copper into it, and it will kick the silver out and complex itself with the copper. at that point all you should have left as solids is your precious metals like gold and palladium. Then after all that, you can move in with aqua regia and start separating those as well.
Also another metal you're probably going to see turn up is Tantalum... from ceramic capacitors, that's another good metal.
Interesting series you have here, as this will be more of a problem as time goes on.
@@kwellerfolds but if the copper chewed away he can do that seperate since its most of the material
Im quite interested in this process and looking at a hydro-metalurgical process to go from table to refining might work well. starting with HCL to remove the bulk (Copper and other base metals) then rinse the rest with distilled water to use HNO3 to remove the Silver and Palladium, after you can use Aqua Regia to get the Gold, Platinum, Ruthenium.
I am a mineral processing engineer. The best next step would be to cast your copper into a bar then elctrowin the copper. your lead tin and presious mettals would then be in the slimes that acumulate in the bottom of the electrowin cell. next you can melt that and cupell to separate the bas metal from the precious next you can separate the gold from the silver. Also the best way to collect the silver from the silver nitrate parting solution is to precipitate the silver using salt then take the silver clorid and put it in a graphite crusible snd cover with soda. you will then redusce the silver cloride to silver metal and end up with a sodium chloirde slag.
This would be more economical than smelting the base metals out?
Nice project. Sreetips or lithic metals are my two favourite refining channels, learnt a lot from both of them
Very awsome way of doing this
wicked sweet awesome possum, Jason!
Great video
I have been trying to get into this since 1989.
Some of those boards and components are actually worth more value at resale to collectors than the amount of minerals you gain! I should know, I collect them :)
What exactly do you collect, what are you looking for?
Love these videos, keep trying brother! 🤘
Streetips colab! Let’s go!
Sreetips might be willing to talk this over with you. He is a precious metal-refining wizard.
Jason is a genius
Great ideea, I'd love to see the conclusions!
Super helpful, I have been collecting gold fingers (trimmed) & CPU’s (p4 pin/pinless, green fiber, amd, ceramic) ect. In all I have about 80 lbs collected, I’ve been looking for ways to extract.
Street tips all the way he knows what he's doing and it would make an awsome video
You should manufacture something similar to what they use at Kennecott copper mine. A spray bar system directly above a conveyor belt with a collecting reservoir underneath. Use various types of acid to spray on the material. Kind of like cyanide leaching, instead of cyanide use specific acids to dissolve each type of metal separately.
Mines often use multiple processes, like flotation as well as heap leach with cyanide as you mentioned.
Even goid sized mines often don't mess with final refining, they send concentrates, anode slimes, or dore bars to specialty refiners.
@@aredditor4272The entire point of Jason's video was to figure out a way for a small mining business to do such work without having to use other resources for refining.
I was offering my advice as a small scale miner and prospector. Using refinery services can be costly.
Great video!
I reading these comments and i just feel dumb not understanding some of these words lol i need to go back to school again haha but jason is probably one of the smartes youtubers i have watched like he doesn't know what to do here so instead of using all his money to figure out ways to do these next steps in becoming a very successful business he asks us thats freaking brilliant for sure bravo jason
You have such a cool job... I wish I was young enough to do it with you!
Love these videos
You for sure have probably the best equipment by far to process and refine electronic circuit boards in MASS quanity if you have access to the mass materials to refine on a consistant basis!
That shaker machine is so cool
Really like the video!
I love recycling videos !
Another great video :) and its also cool that there are places finding ways to do this safer as e-waste is a huge problem in the throw away society (things are just not made to last or be repaired)
You can do this:
Mill stuff with ball mill into a powder
Dump all powder into a huge vat that has a drain with a valve, add water
Add solid bleach powder (pool supplies) as a source of chlorine (this is cheaper than HCL acid, then mix, then add nitric acid (technical grade)
Mix the slurry then cover with something
Chlorine will be formed with acid reaction and it will also form aqua regia
Aqua regia will leach silver, gold and copper
Wait 20-30 minutes, then drain liquid
Filter liquid, then add sulfaminic acid to destroy nitric acid
Then add ferrous sulfate to drop out all metals
Congratulations, you have copper, silver, gold + platinum group in a cup
Take all results from above, add Nitric acid + water, heat to boil, that will leach out silver and platinum group out, filter sediment out and wash in boiling water a few times, the dissolved silver / copper / platinum group will be in the filtered liquid.
To extract silver, drop in vat a few copper pipes, copper will dissolve cuz it's more chemically electroactive and silver will precipitate
Then take precipitated silver and run through the electric cell (see screetips vids how to set up for like 5$)
Alternatively you can precipitate silver (but also platinum which I don't like) using hydrozine hydrochloride N2H5Cl. I don't recommend this method cuz it's very toxic
Then you can drop out from copper silver platinum solution platinum group but it's pointless and dangerous cuz platinum group salts will kill you if you work with them without proper protection
The washed out sediment that contains gold you dissolve again in boiling aqua regia, then extinguish nitric acid with sulfaminic acid. Sulfaminic acid is not mandatory but it helps to reduce amount of SMB - (sodium metabisulfide) used in the next step.
Once nitric acid is extinguisherd, add SMB to precipitate gold. Take gold powder and boil in nitric acid to leach out leftover crap. Then wash and melt precipitated powder. You now have 9999 gold.
Please refer to steetips channel, he's the man you want to talk
Another method:
Melt all collected metal into huge sheets/bars
Stick them into an acid galvanic cell and transfer copper between the anode and the cathode. The gold and platinum will precipitate on the bottom as a sludge. You'll have pure copper/silver sheets which can be further reprocessed using acid method and sludge can be processed using aqua regia
TOO EXPENSIVE
I like your idea, I'm in at the start.
Enjoy your videos.
Best idea so far dealing with electronic waste is to first get rid of the solder by low heat. Solder (tin and lead) are terrible.
From that point, copper and precious metals can be separated by HCL which will pull copper and base metal from the higher precious metals. Heat (thermal breakdown) should be able to separate the next stage of metal recovery. Temperature for Gold is much lower than silver, palladium and platinum.
Good luck with the experiment and thanks for your videos. Keep recording, we'll keep watching 👍😁.
I have an idea for you to more accurately sort your concentrates. Add an adjustable diverter to the underside or the shaker table so you can slide it left and right to line up exactly where your separation lines are. I apologize if you already have this. Love the content.
the tables have that already I own 4 they came with that.
Hi jason , great content .
Have you tried to seperate using specific gravity and /as well as viscosity. Possibly with an ultra sonic bath including some sort of flow through arangement like a shaker table . Or using more viscous liquid over your shaker table ? . Messing with acids are very bad for your health . Another thought is to use spacific melting points .
Hi Jason, been watching your vids for a while now, ive even bought myself a hammer mill so I can give this a crack!. Admittedly my setup is quite janky, hammer mill is for animal feed so putting circuit boards through it is putting it to the test, also cant afford your shaker tables so im using a gold sluice. very green to it all but im also working on this seperation problem! My latest crack is trying seperation by electrolysis. It reads on paper as being a relatively cheap way to go about it. Will have to give you an update if it works or not
Either or, keep up the good work and keep getting more people into cleaning up our tiny little marble by recycling our scrap!
Amazing bro
I go dumpster diving in the dumpsters of section 8 houses, because they throw away so many expensive things. One of the most common items that I find are laptops, and old electronics. I'm very lucky to live so close to a treasure bin like that.
The key to this working even more beautifully than youve already demonstrated would be an even finer crush. Some kind of way to make it even finer and finer and finer until you have basically powder and then youd be able to effectively use your shaker table to separate the gold/silver/platinum groups out. Smelting it as it is just adds too many impurities into the final smelt. Thats just my opinion however, you and all these other commenters have way more experience and knowledge than I do with my short 33 years
Very cool experiment Jason. Thanks 🙏
Did you run the shaker table differently?
It seems that the amount of “heavies” was a lot more than when you run gold bearing materials.
I think these boards are just that rich there are alot more heavies
Working at a big low grade gold mine that ran a huge semi-autogenous mill and heap leach pads. Watching these videos makes me wonder if these bigger outfits could be using these techniques to bring material into the process to kick up the head-grade a bit and reduce ewaste. How many metallurgist and mine engineers are watching and talking? Great video and thank you for the effort!
The best and most profitable way is to put it in the copper refining process. Mitsubishi materials has it down to perfection.
Smelting the concentrates down then cornflaking them, put it in nitric to get the gold out then put copper in the acid to get out the silver then iron to get the copper. You should check out the metal reactivity table
interesting seeing it processed this way every time ive seen it done its done with acids
probably best chemical process from the dust before smelting!
Like what your doing. Trying to find the same answers you are for hobby level. Hoping to start experimenting as soon as i finish my ball mill using an old front load washer. Happy to share anything i learn. I intend to smelt high copper content bars for electrowinning and aqueous processing of anode slimes.
On your ball mill try using an electric concrete mixer. You should be able to get one used fairly inexpensive.
@@richardmckinney4963 thought about using my mixer until i came across this washer. I like that it already has holes as a material screen and all i got to do is modify to put a catch pan under it.
@@Pyrannasaurus the problem with using the washing tub is that the metal used in making it is not as strong and not designed to take the impacts that yhe mixer can take.
Oh Jason Jason Jason... it would be so awesome seeing you doing a collaboration with Sreetips and this product. I dream...
Wow, I actually really like that method. I agree with you that there's a massive amount that most people wouldn't rather not bother. I only read a couple comments, but I didn't really agree with the Alan Evans guy I would actually like to be a part of helping in anyway that I can sure I'll buy some but if there's anything else I can do, let me know I live in California and I've recently become kind of obsessed with scrapping PCs, and all electronics for that matter. It seems I have kind of a good supply available to me consistently. I see this as a way of making a boatload of money if the process can be sorted out.
You might be able to use magnetism to pull your ferrous metal out of the molten liquid. That's probably the simplest filter for iron and steel. Different metals have different specific gravities and melting points. They also solidify at different temperatures. You might try experimenting with different temperatures so that you only melt / slidify a specific metal in order to remove it / isolate it. Gradually "crack" the metals by temperature changes. Kind of like the way oil refineries "cack" petroleum into different products using cracking towers. Looks cool. Good luck.
Part one of 2.
You made a terrible mess out of otherwise prime Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), lol.
I never crush PCBs, always keep them whole. As a backyard scrapper I process tons of high/medium/low grade Printed Circuit Boards myself. One of the most valuable fractions of PCBs, at least when it's low grade, is the solder. A hydrometallurgical process removes all the solder without damaging any of the electronic components. Tin, lead, and a little silver is recovered from the liquid solution (tin is worth 3½ times more than copper). After solder removal all the components simply fall off the board, ready to be sorted and processed in batches of not less than 50kg of each individual component. Virtually every single value of each component will be extracted afterwards.
Then the bare boards themselves are processed. All plated gold is recovered (even the ENIG), the bromine (Fire Retardant) is extracted, the epoxy resin is cracked into fuel oil, and the thin copper layers are recovered as well. The remaining glass fibers are not profitable to sell, but a glass recycler picks them up for free so at least I have no disposal costs.
Crushing the PCBs creates nothing but troubles, as it's no longer possible to distinguish between the individual electronic components. They all require different procedures for the full recovery of the values in them. Contrary to the large industrial recyclers who have highly specialized equipment for sorting the crushed pieces (like automatic magnetic separation of ferrous, very expensive eddy current systems for sorting out non-ferrous metals, and near-infrared sensor controlled compressed air systems with blow nozzles for removal of plastic parts), we backyard scrappers have to stick to the rule of KISS. (Keep It Super Simple) and more or less sort every component by hand, but fast and efficient.
After solder removal, the large components (fx. aluminium heat sinks) are easily picked out. Then I turn to sifting. Coarse, medium, fine, extra fine sieves separates the electronic components by size, thus making them easier to sort and prepare for further processing of each individual type. The very small components (fx. the very tiny surface mounted resistors and MLCCs, among others) are not hand sorted but just divided in magnetic and non magnetic types to be processed in several steps later.
Running PCBs through a hammermill creates a lot of hazardous dust in the form of microscopic glass fibers, airborne glass particles, dangerous dust from ceramics, carcinogenic beryllium dust, poisonous arsen/arsenic dust, and a serious risk of exposing yourself to mercury vapor; just to name a few. A very bad choice for processing PCBs! There is a good reason why e-waste is classified as hazardous waste.
Another thing to consider is when PCBs are run through a hammermill a lot of the gold plating will be knocked of and most likely be reduced to extremely small particles, which will be trapped in glass fibers from the boards and probably in the dust from other components as well. You face a loss of values using a shaker table, though as the water is recycled some of the dust and a lesser part of the tiny particles might be recovered by filtering the waste water. Notice that all gold plating present on PCBs is on the surface of the boards. Keeping the boards whole during the recovery process eliminates any problem with gold trapped in the glass fibers.
All in all, it's not profitable trying to mechanically separate out wet metal crumbles because hydrometallurgical processing followed by dry sieving gives you the possibility to recover the total values from undamaged electronic components. Crushing PCBs in the hammermill followed by melting the metal crumbles will also result in an inevitable loss of all aluminium and aluminium bearing components. The same will happen if such components are submerged in acid. Hydrometallurgical processes in different steps will recover >99% of the aluminium.
Other valuable components like LCD displays, in which indium (as ITO oxide) is present in the panel glass, will be totally destroyed in the hammermill, with no possibility to recover the indium.
Melting the metal fraction into a mixed lump of several metals makes separation extremely problematic. Commercial refiners use techniques backyard refiners can only dream of, like high pressure leaching in different temperature steps, and highly efficient solvent extractions with expensive proprietary solvents developed with each having an affinity for a single element. Just try to buy such solvents in small quantities, and you'll discover that the mere purchase will eat your entire profit. Therefore the only way for amateur refiners or small recycling businesses to gain anything from e-waste is to carefully separate as much as possible before processing it. Everybody who have just a little chemical insight knows that each element (in the Periodic Table) can only be extracted one by one. Unfortunately many elements have almost the same properties, thus many are really hard to extract separately.
The valuable REEs (Rare Earth Elements) already presents a huge challenge to work with. Mixed in with a bunch of other elements in a lump of various metals, they can only be considered lost.
A very sobering post concerning both the economics and health issues. I was going to suggest wearing a mask and gloves but after reading your input..I think finding and paying a refiner would be the way to go.
The older ewaste that contained higher levels of precious metals is also getting harder to source..
No disrespect to the OP..great to see him having a crack!
Any videos? I’d love to see all that!!!
@@rallim77 Videos covering the subject scrapping and/or metal recovery and metal refining achieves rather limited views. They'll never go viral (too specialized), thus despite the possible ad revenue from Google it won't be profitable. I'll make more on scrapping/recycling than spending the same time it takes to make each video. However, as I have a reasonable knowledge of the chemistry involved in streamlined and effective high volume scrapping/recycling processes I might be able to help you with tips and advices. What would you like to know?
I have been recovering precious metal from e-waste. I use the standard chemicals to release gold coatings and to dissolve gold and precipitate gold. I haven't recovered any other precious metal yet, but soon. Very small scale as a hobby.
Good luck I've been playing with this stuff for about two years breaking even is the best I've ever did with free Ewaist and very choice material!!!! But if copper goes to five or six bucks a pound we might have a profit!!! I'm commenting on the full circle process!!! This is my hobby but the chemicals are expensive. Equipment is expensive. Filtering takes forever lol !!! Love the videos and the learning keep up the great work 👍 😊
Great video, Jason. It gives me some hope for our future. I'll bid on a bag. -- Dave
Sreetips can lay the whole process out he's the man.
as a scraper i sugest that you use some acids to refine the material before the melting
but some ppl ju melt all material in to bars and sell it as it is
but ill would refine it first then melt it
great video jason
This method may be completely speculative, but worth checking out.
Using a conical basin mounted to a centrifuge, add a sample amount of concentrate with water, and let the basin spin.
In theory, the combination of centrifugal force and basin angle will cause the different metals to separate by weight. Whichever metal makes up the outer edge can be scooped out.
Critiques or opinions? Please share!
I have sometimes wondered if a series of centrifuges could be used to refine things like seawater and try to pull stuff like lithium out of it..
Way cool!
It's possible to recover every single element and purify it into a separate stream. But that would probably be very costly and labor intensive. i'm not exactly certain what would be the most profitable avenue.
The most straightforward metal to recover, and thus probably the most profitable, is copper. You would set up a copper sulfate based electrorefining cell and produce metal cathodes that would be directly pure enough for resale. You would end up with zinc, nickel and iron sulfate wastes, i'm not sure if recovering metal from that is worth it. But if you wanted to try you could electrowin them from the sulfate. Meanwhile the anode sludge from the copper refining process would have lead, silver and gold. You would use the Parke's process to separate the silver and gold from the lead. The lead could then be sold off. Granted it won't be very pure, but most lead uses don't need battery grade lead anyway. Meanwhile, the zinc containing silver and gold from the parkes process would be processed to recover the precious metals. I'm not sure what backyard chemistry would be most accessible. Normally the zinc would be heated until boiling to boil it off and lead the gold and silver behind. But thats one thousand celsius and probably inaccessible to the amateur. Acid leaching would be very easy, but acid costs money and then you have to recover the zinc from the acid leachate. However you do it, you would have a sludge or ingot of precious metals that could be dissolved in nitric acid and aqua regia to recover the individual silver and gold components.
At least that would be my approach off the top of my head. I have no idea if what i just said is feasible and profitable.
Thank you for the insights! I also believe that electrowinning is the way to go. I am going to try this in the near future. One concern is poisoning the electrolyte with too much iron, zinc, aluminum, etc and stalling out the copper electrowinning process. I think the slimes will be much easier to refine once the copper is out. The tin may be a problem, but it is also valuable, so it is worth trying to recover. Thanks for watching and commenting!