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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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. ;]
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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).
@@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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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!
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I was looking for metal recycling from PCBs and my search landed here. The pyramids/ bars are direct market (remelt) requirement. Iron can be removed through oxygen purging but as a result you'll lose Al and other oxidation active metals as well. Thank you for sharing, for me it was a good learning experience.
As a previous compounder I’ve found hot, cold, neutral and electrostatic roller pins will identify the materials by its structure once rolled and sometimes rolled again for more passes if necessary. I hope this helps. Like the WTC’s were brought down by sheets of copper, pallets of portfolios and fire (jet fuel) that melted the copper (cut right through steel like a plasma cutter). Jerry
The largest part of your pyramid, 80-85%, is copper, and the easiest way to remove it, for the most part, is by electrolytic transfer in a copper nitrate bath on a stainless steel cathode. Then remove the iron and nickel from the mud with a magnet. Then nitric acid for what's left, tin lead zinc etc, but also silver. Silver in nitric can be precipitated with copper. White metals can be recovered with sodium or by evaporating nitric. Gold and PGM is not dissolved by nitric and can be recovered with aqua regia. What remains at the end is inert ash.
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!
you didnt scroll down on the rxf gun , i only seen 98.35 of the tally , you need to scroll down on the reading to see the other 1.65 % of metal . What was under Lead ?
Jason, i think this is going to piss off those big time recycling companies. This is absolutely how they do it. Thank you for taking the risk and showing us all.
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 .
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.
It's so crazy that this is what your doing I scrap myself and I've been saving mother boards because scrap yards won't pay what I know they are worth. I really need one of your crushers and shaker tables! I save anything that I know has copper or precious metals in them. I think if you could get that stuff grinded down to an even finner powder then extend the length of your shaker table/modify the grooves in the tabble it could possibly work to separate the powder into perfect or nearly perfect base metals. Grinding the metals into powder though would help separate the plated materials better. The smaller the better I believe
I wonder if Streetips would be intrested (he uses acid to extract gold and silver from scrap jewelry and scrap silver, further refines the silver via a 'silver cell') I do believe he's played around with gold plated fingers and pins before but not shredded e-waste
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!
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
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!
@@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?
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.
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.
@@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.
Just a second thought, I wonder if getting your shot pieces and running them through a silver cell would help or alternatively put the powdered copper etc into an AP solution as this will take away the copper then dry the non copper at the bottom of the AP container and run through the crucible the rest then use the silver cell to get the silver from the shot and use some stainless steel in your AP solution to cement out pure copper. I haven't built a gold cell but I believe you can construct one of those too which may also increase your recovery.
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.
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 .
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
im in no way an expert in this. but would you be able to take the iron out of the sifted stuff with your magnet conveyer belt, after the sifting? I have a one metal at a time way of thinking about stuff like this and it just seams like running it down that multiple times would do a lot of the work for you. I would guess that this isn't the best way of doing it, but it seams like the less work way to deal with one metal contaminating the rest
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.
I wonder if starting with a sulfuric acid stripping cell would work on the dried crumbs. The biggest problem is the copper extraction. Nitric acid which is great is not cost effective for that much copper. I would guess electroplate the copper from the cone ores first. Then acid boil using hcl, then nitric. The rest of the material should go into aqua regia. I’m not set up for this yet, but I am working on it now.
Amateur questions here: with the Lithium batteries recycling, which buckets are the Lithium, Cobalt, and Graphite going? Is it recycled in this process?
I am not an expert, but do not different metals have different specific gravities? Can you take advantage of that somehow to separate metals before smelting?
As a chemical engineer, I've been working on the purification process using nitric acid and spontaneous deposition of metals. There is a cheap and easy way to separate and purify each one of the metals. (I've tryed the process at a lab, not yet at a industrial scale). If you are interested, I could explain you with further detail.
I would expect the quantitative analysis process, or a variation, would selectively precipitate individual metal compounds. However, you would then have to purify the metals. I expect there would be huge amounts of waste that would need costly treatment.
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 :)
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.
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
I was watching this video and was wondering if you have tried using sodium hydroxide solution to remove solder and aluminum while leaving copper and precious metal
I have no idea,,, but what happens if you drip the melt thru your water-hammermill and in to the vibration-table .. Can it be separated in the "mill-speed" to super-small particles which are in the different metalls or dass it go to strait to 😬 (With slow pouring should it not be worse then pour in the water bucket if its enough water-flow to cool )
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 think you are losing a lot of gold from the black ceramic microchips. The gold bonding wires in them are EXTREMELY small... you are most likely losing them where ever your ceramics are going. I don't think your hammer mill is pulverizing them enough to liberate all of the gold fibers completely. I think a board stripper and classifying system for components is in order. The chips should go through a much more contained and thorough process. Gold that small is way too easy to wash out with other things.
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!
Let's say Off the Record someone takes 200 Silver coated Mercury Head dimes and melts them down? How much silver would be extracted? I've been saving E Boards ( are they called Computer chip boards?) so I'm learning. I know enough to wear gloves too 22:35
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.
A good way to solve a vast majority of problems. Well stated.❤
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 says on avg he gets 1.5g gold per pound trimmed fingers without trying to get old ones. Just asked him yesterday.
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.
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...
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
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.
I 100% agree Sreetips is the best. A true wealth of knowledge
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.
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
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 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
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.
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.
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
SREETIPS. He's your man. This sounds like a colab series!!!
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
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.
Agree, go as small as possible.
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!
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
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 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.
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.
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..
I think it is great to see you make the common mistakes that us amateurs would make if we did on own great presentation.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
been waiting for this video! talk about something that grabs my attention. the way u called it ore made so much sense
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
Jason, I'm curious how much this equipment setup costs to get to the concentrated metals.
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.
I was looking for metal recycling from PCBs and my search landed here.
The pyramids/ bars are direct market (remelt) requirement.
Iron can be removed through oxygen purging but as a result you'll lose Al and other oxidation active metals as well.
Thank you for sharing, for me it was a good learning experience.
As a previous compounder I’ve found hot, cold, neutral and electrostatic roller pins will identify the materials by its structure once rolled and sometimes rolled again for more passes if necessary. I hope this helps. Like the WTC’s were brought down by sheets of copper, pallets of portfolios and fire (jet fuel) that melted the copper (cut right through steel like a plasma cutter).
Jerry
The largest part of your pyramid, 80-85%, is copper, and the easiest way to remove it, for the most part, is by electrolytic transfer in a copper nitrate bath on a stainless steel cathode.
Then remove the iron and nickel from the mud with a magnet.
Then nitric acid for what's left, tin lead zinc etc, but also silver. Silver in nitric can be precipitated with copper.
White metals can be recovered with sodium or by evaporating nitric.
Gold and PGM is not dissolved by nitric and can be recovered with aqua regia.
What remains at the end is inert ash.
What tool you use in 19:04 ?
It’s a handheld XRF gun.
A cool piece of gear if you have 10-30K at your disposal.
I think Jason uses a friends XRF gun to get the analysis.
@@StirlingLighthouse thanks man, appreciate it
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!
Love it! You continue to bring great content that's informative & clear while raising the same questions I have. 👍 keep up the great work!!
you didnt scroll down on the rxf gun , i only seen 98.35 of the tally , you need to scroll down on the reading to see the other 1.65 % of metal . What was under Lead ?
Can you sift it and classify by size? Then you could use a centrifuge to separate by density.
Jason, i think this is going to piss off those big time recycling companies. This is absolutely how they do it. Thank you for taking the risk and showing us all.
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 .
Sreetips might be willing to talk this over with you. He is a precious metal-refining wizard.
I am Seriously impressed! This is alot harder than people think.
Jason, I've looked at a lot of different approaches. I like yours the best.
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?
It's so crazy that this is what your doing I scrap myself and I've been saving mother boards because scrap yards won't pay what I know they are worth. I really need one of your crushers and shaker tables! I save anything that I know has copper or precious metals in them. I think if you could get that stuff grinded down to an even finner powder then extend the length of your shaker table/modify the grooves in the tabble it could possibly work to separate the powder into perfect or nearly perfect base metals. Grinding the metals into powder though would help separate the plated materials better. The smaller the better I believe
I wonder if Streetips would be intrested (he uses acid to extract gold and silver from scrap jewelry and scrap silver, further refines the silver via a 'silver cell')
I do believe he's played around with gold plated fingers and pins before but not shredded e-waste
Do you ever consider there's any loss from when it comes out the shredder and off the belt from the free dust flowing in the wind of fine partials ?
I was wondering if you put a finer mesh in the shaker table hammer mill if that would help the shaker table separate all the elements better?
Sorry Jason did not read all comments, what about all the dust at the hammer mill discharge. Any gold or silver dust being lost ?
Absolutely STUNNING video.
VERY much RESPECT..........!
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.
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
How does the sifter know how to categorize the metals?? Are they guided by magnets?
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?
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
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.
Just a second thought, I wonder if getting your shot pieces and running them through a silver cell would help or alternatively put the powdered copper etc into an AP solution as this will take away the copper then dry the non copper at the bottom of the AP container and run through the crucible the rest then use the silver cell to get the silver from the shot and use some stainless steel in your AP solution to cement out pure copper. I haven't built a gold cell but I believe you can construct one of those too which may also increase your recovery.
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.
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 .
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
May I ask how much energy did you consume to recycle all this? Is it economicaly positive in the end?
If I had 2 trashcans of circuit boards of all kinds do you think it would be worth doing this myself or just sell the boards as is
Quick question, at the end of everything when you got the pyramids, what happen to the gold?
A very interesting process. If this was scaled up how would the microplastic risk be mitigated? - could you close-loop the water usage?
Glad to see those valuable resources being recycled here in the United States 👍
im in no way an expert in this.
but would you be able to take the iron out of the sifted stuff with your magnet conveyer belt, after the sifting?
I have a one metal at a time way of thinking about stuff like this and it just seams like running it down that multiple times would do a lot of the work for you. I would guess that this isn't the best way of doing it, but it seams like the less work way to deal with one metal contaminating the rest
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.
I wish the XRF would sort the output by decending-percentage - I don't understand why it doesn't?
I wonder if starting with a sulfuric acid stripping cell would work on the dried crumbs.
The biggest problem is the copper extraction. Nitric acid which is great is not cost effective for that much copper. I would guess electroplate the copper from the cone ores first. Then acid boil using hcl, then nitric. The rest of the material should go into aqua regia. I’m not set up for this yet, but I am working on it now.
Amateur questions here: with the Lithium batteries recycling, which buckets are the Lithium, Cobalt, and Graphite going? Is it recycled in this process?
I am not an expert, but do not different metals have different specific gravities? Can you take advantage of that somehow to separate metals before smelting?
As a chemical engineer, I've been working on the purification process using nitric acid and spontaneous deposition of metals. There is a cheap and easy way to separate and purify each one of the metals. (I've tryed the process at a lab, not yet at a industrial scale). If you are interested, I could explain you with further detail.
I would expect the quantitative analysis process, or a variation, would selectively precipitate individual metal compounds. However, you would then have to purify the metals. I expect there would be huge amounts of waste that would need costly treatment.
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?
what does the smallest complete PCB processor cost?
Is there an email i can send my question to?
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.
dude your awesome.. its people like you that advance society
Thanks for trying this.. Glad to see it.. I can't help but I can really appreciate the effort and wish you success
what if you use a spin caster like a centrifuge do you think the would separate????
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 was watching this video and was wondering if you have tried using sodium hydroxide solution to remove solder and aluminum while leaving copper and precious metal
I have no idea,,, but what happens if you drip the melt thru your water-hammermill and in to the vibration-table .. Can it be separated in the "mill-speed" to super-small particles which are in the different metalls or dass it go to strait to 😬 (With slow pouring should it not be worse then pour in the water bucket if its enough water-flow to cool )
Streetips colab! Let’s go!
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 👍😁.
@10:08... you start tondo real interesting refining of all of the preceeding work.
Good job... real interesting stuff..
Thank you
I think you are losing a lot of gold from the black ceramic microchips. The gold bonding wires in them are EXTREMELY small... you are most likely losing them where ever your ceramics are going. I don't think your hammer mill is pulverizing them enough to liberate all of the gold fibers completely. I think a board stripper and classifying system for components is in order. The chips should go through a much more contained and thorough process. Gold that small is way too easy to wash out with other things.
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!
Let's say Off the Record someone takes 200 Silver coated Mercury Head dimes and melts them down? How much silver would be extracted? I've been saving E Boards ( are they called Computer chip boards?) so I'm learning. I know enough to wear gloves too 22:35
Nice project. Sreetips or lithic metals are my two favourite refining channels, learnt a lot from both of them