Profitability of Gold refining from ewaste

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Victor Mkhaliphi

New member
Joined
Jun 15, 2017
Messages
2
Good day all,

I came across this forum about a week ago and I am grateful I did. This community of refiners is knowledgeable and progressive. I find the info here invaluable. Thanks to all contributors.

I am based in South Africa, I am a Metallurgical Engineer by profession - though i have mainly worked with coal, heavy mineral sands, iron ore and diamonds. Never with BMs,PMs or PGMs.

I am starting a gold refining business, refining from secondary sources, primarily e-waste (urban mining as they say).

I have done my research and this forum has helped me a lot in this regard. I think there is a business case for gold refining from e-waste. My figures indicate that the business will be profitable. I recognize that the profitability of the business will inadvertently depend on various factors such as, the availability of the feed material and the costs of sourcing such, chemicals costs, the quality of gold produced and the price of gold, currency inflation and so on.

However, I would like to hear from you guys what have you found to be the reality especially in the US or anywhere in the world for that matter, in so far as profitability is concerned.

Thanks. Keep up the good work.

Victor
 
Victor Mkhaliphi said:
Good day all,

I came across this forum about a week ago and I am grateful I did. This community of refiners is knowledgeable and progressive. I find the info here invaluable. Thanks to all contributors.

I am based in South Africa, I am a Metallurgical Engineer by profession - though i have mainly worked with coal, heavy mineral sands, iron ore and diamonds. Never with BMs,PMs or PGMs.

I am starting a gold refining business, refining from secondary sources, primarily e-waste (urban mining as they say).

I have done my research and this forum has helped me a lot in this regard. I think there is a business case for gold refining from e-waste. My figures indicate that the business will be profitable. I recognize that the profitability of the business will inadvertently depend on various factors such as, the availability of the feed material and the costs of sourcing such, chemicals costs, the quality of gold produced and the price of gold, currency inflation and so on.

However, I would like to hear from you guys what have you found to be the reality especially in the US or anywhere in the world for that matter, in so far as profitability is concerned.

Thanks. Keep up the good work.

Victor

Profitability is the key word, as far as I'm concerned. In 50 years, I have never processed anything in quantity, unless I had proved to myself, through assays and experimentation, that it would be profitable - never. I preach this a lot but usually to deaf ears.

Much e-waste is profitable only on a grand scale, using mass techniques such as incineration. Some e-scrap is not profitable at all. I recently read where a very large European refiner, running cell phones using the best techniques on huge quantities, was only able to break even.

Being set up to evaluate the material accurately is very important. Experimentation on a very small scale is the first step in working out a proper, profitable process. There are many different ways of processing each type of material (we say, "There are many ways to skin a cat") and there is no single best process for anything in every situation. It all depends on the variables - money available, safety, profitability, simplicity, speed, etc., etc. When considering the best process for a certain situation, I always look at the negative aspects first. Not safe enough (#1), too slow, too much labor, too complicated, need too much equipment, etc. Find the business before setting up the process.

If I were starting out without a lot of money and if I didn't already have a locked-in sure-fire, ongoing, scrap source. I would first set up for fire assay (about $5000), build at least a #20 gas fired pot furnace, and build about a 5 foot wide fume hood. With this, you can make money evaluating scrap and buying and selling. A friend of mine often talked back and forth to the seller and a buyer, simultaneously, on 2 phone lines. He didn't do the deal until both parties were locked in at a profit to him.

Just some ideas.
 
Hi goldsilverpro.

I appreciate your insight. 50 years is a long time I must say.

A few points from me:

1. Experimenting on small scale: That is the best start, because it is during this stage where mistakes are made and learnings are gained.

2.Profitability on a grand scale: I am not in favor of incineration. I think we need to be a bit innovative in how we deal with the other waste like plastic etc.

3. "Find the business before setting up the process"

This is really critical. I am optimistic that there is business to be made here because of the following factors

- US $ exchange vs. South African Rand currency rate: $1 = R 12.8. Therefore the earnings are attractive.
- Use of high quality feed material and especially supplementing the feed with old jewelry stock.
- Recycling/purification of any spent solutions e.g. AR.

I welcome more takes on this. Thanks.
 
Chris has a few years on me but considering my 45 years doing this, I agree with Chris that for a general refiner, a refinery that processes what comes in, incineration and separation of the crushable ash to sample and ship to a smelter and melting of the metallic fraction to ship to a copper smelter is the way to go. If you are seeing enough e-scrap, you can smelt the copper fraction yourself and recover the copper and the PM's from the cell slimes.

But everything stems from the assay lab. You need to know what is in your metallic bars whether you refine them in house or ship them out, and in house processing of the powdered sweeps is never profitable in house unless you want to invest in something like a plasma arc furnace.

I have been having good success with e-scrap using granulation and cyanide stripping of the gold containing components. The granulation allows for good contact of the hidden layers of gold plating often encapsulated in the material so the cyanide can reach all of the values. The recovery of the gold and silver from the cyanide is pretty straight forward and by keeping the cyanide dilute you can minimize the attack on the copper. This leaves you with the copper on the very low / no yield granulated pieces which can be smelted and sold as copper. Copper smelters pay on very low levels of gold so any gold you missed because the strip wasn't able to contact the plating, you will be paid on by the copper smelter. And you will have put it in a form which you can assay. That is why you melt them into bars and ship the bars.

For a viable e-scrap business you need volume and methods tailored to your feedstock. And as Chris pointed out and I will reiterate, you need to have the ability to do the analytics to succeed.
 
Victor Mkhaliphi said:
1. Experimenting on small scale: That is the best start, because it is during this stage where mistakes are made and learnings are gained.

Depends on your idea of "small scale". I started out like everyone, trying to run a small amount of material. Small material = small yield. Trying to gauge whether or not a buy is profitable on a large scale, based upon laboratory examination of a small amount of material is very difficult. Rounding errors make or break your operation. When you look at boards that are selling for $4 USD and they only return $5 USD in metal content, you are really only talking about .025 gram of gold, out of 454 grams....and that is if that $1 profit is gold.

Right now I concentrate only on really weird industrial scrap. I won't even call it e-scrap. I do well on it, but it's because I spend a lot of time looking for it. It runs parallel with a business that pays the bills. It does not pay my menial bills alone, nor could it.
 
Unless I were capable of legal incineration, the only e-scrap I would ever process would be fingers and other items I could cherry-pick from boards that would be profitable. In other words, I don't think that about 90% of today's secondary e-scrap is profitable to process chemically and I wouldn't normally touch it with a 10-fot pole. The best electronic scrap, by far, comes from electronics manufacturers - industrial scrap. The worst, by far, are stuffed circuit boards (used boards stuffed with components). I hate that stuff, unless I can burn it.

Once you have a person with adequate knowledge and hands-on experience of the refining processes and scrap evaluation, the most important person in a refinery is the one who can intelligently and knowledgeably locate and obtain good profitable scrap, especially that which is available on an ongoing basis.

I'm sure that many would disagree, but I put stuffed boards in the same category as fool's gold, FeS2, with an emphasis on the word "fool's", unless, as I said before, you can burn them. And, even if you are able to burn them, there are still many e-scrap items that won't turn a profit.
 
A member of this forum once said- when it comes to e-scrap everything is aboult volume. I did not beleive him an d started to think big. That was 5 years ago. If you are small player you have got to find big buyer. His job is to deal with the smelters and so on. If you want to deal with acids then you need "rich" electronics wich is hard to find nowdays. It is not easy, if you want to be a big player then you need big money, very big money and alot of nervs because everyone will lie you from the smallest seller to the bigest buyer. One advice - buy low.l, sell high as fast as possible
 
As GSP and 4metals have pointed out the person who knows exactly what they have is hard to rip off but that needs assays which can start to get expensive even in the UK where assays are much cheaper than many other places, as little as £10 for a simple gold or silver assay.
Refining as I have pointed out many times is not for everyone but you can still make money sourcing scrap and selling on, yes someone else makes money but that’s why everyone is in business, always leave a profit for the next guy or he won’t be around for the next time.
 
The worst, by far, are stuffed circuit boards (used boards stuffed with components). I hate that stuff, unless I can burn it.
Hi
Circuit boards can contain mercury switches, mercury relays, nickel cadmium batteries, or lithium batteries. Batteries are recognizable but mercury switches and relays not for a amateur refiner or labor

So How smelters or refiners deal with this problem ? :?
How you contain the feed is safe for incineration?

I want to switch from button batteries to electronic scraps because they have mercury but today I found electronic scraps have hazardous metals like mercury, cadmium and beryllium!!!

I think mercury love me
 
They do it by filtering the particles, then electrostatic precipitation of the remaining particulate matter, then condensation of vapor.

Edited to remove crabbiness. But I would strongly suggest to the poster that they work on nailing the basics, and taking advice given in other threads.
 
4metals said:
Chris has a few years on me but considering my 45 years doing this, I agree with Chris that for a general refiner, a refinery that processes what comes in, incineration and separation of the crushable ash to sample and ship to a smelter and melting of the metallic fraction to ship to a copper smelter is the way to go. If you are seeing enough e-scrap, you can smelt the copper fraction yourself and recover the copper and the PM's from the cell slimes.

But everything stems from the assay lab. You need to know what is in your metallic bars whether you refine them in house or ship them out, and in house processing of the powdered sweeps is never profitable in house unless you want to invest in something like a plasma arc furnace.

I have been having good success with e-scrap using granulation and cyanide stripping of the gold containing components. The granulation allows for good contact of the hidden layers of gold plating often encapsulated in the material so the cyanide can reach all of the values. The recovery of the gold and silver from the cyanide is pretty straight forward and by keeping the cyanide dilute you can minimize the attack on the copper. This leaves you with the copper on the very low / no yield granulated pieces which can be smelted and sold as copper. Copper smelters pay on very low levels of gold so any gold you missed because the strip wasn't able to contact the plating, you will be paid on by the copper smelter. And you will have put it in a form which you can assay. That is why you melt them into bars and ship the bars.

For a viable e-scrap business you need volume and methods tailored to your feedstock. And as Chris pointed out and I will reiterate, you need to have the ability to do the analytics to succeed.
How would you handle mercury and other hazerdous material?

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