Accomplished nothing so far

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Yggdrasil said:
Have you treated them according to the protocols in our waste treatment thread?
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I have been neutralizing and disposing of acid/base waste since my Dad bought me my first Gilbert Chemistry set back in 1969. I used sodium bicarbonate on diluted acid to neutralize and dispose of a little more than a gallon of waste liquid the other day. I’ve still got some solid waste from that bucket to incinerate. But I’m gonna do some checking first since I did recover some actual gold particles swimming in the solution during neutralization. That development surprised me. I thought the AR would’ve dissolved all gold. But what I recovered was very much like grains of raw gold I’ve panned before. Interesting…
 
Edwin Price said:
I have been neutralizing and disposing of acid/base waste since my Dad bought me my first Gilbert Chemistry set back in 1969. I used sodium bicarbonate on diluted acid to neutralize and dispose of a little more than a gallon of waste liquid the other day. I’ve still got some solid waste from that bucket to incinerate. But I’m gonna do some checking first since I did recover some actual gold particles swimming in the solution during neutralization. That development surprised me. I thought the AR would’ve dissolved all gold. But what I recovered was very much like grains of raw gold I’ve panned before. Interesting…
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Foils go real fast in AR. Solid tiny nuggets will take a lot longer to dissolve. Depending on the silver content, they may never fully dissolve in AR.

Using soda ash to push out metal hydroxides is they way to go, good to hear that. You may consider the solubilty of the different hydroxides and notice that some redissolve if pH is raised further. Therefore i filter in between at certain points, when other hydroxides are forming in the waste.
I can share a graph if i can find it.
 
Martijn said:
Foils go real fast in AR. Solid tiny nuggets will take a lot longer to dissolve. Depending on the silver content, they may never fully dissolve in AR.

Using soda ash to push out metal hydroxides is they way to go, good to hear that. You may consider the solubilty of the different hydroxides and notice that some redissolve if pH is raised further. Therefore i filter in between at certain points, when other hydroxides are forming in the waste.
I can share a graph if i can find it.
Click to expand...
Thank you. I’m being environmentally conscious like I was taught by the Navy and US Commercial Nuclear Industry. Licensed plumbers in this area think nothing of dumping a litre of Clobber (concentrated Sulphuric Acid) down the drain to remove clogs. Most over the counter drain cleaners around here are Alkaline based.
 
Tangent; I got into this refining hobby because I’ve always enjoyed Chemistry and mineral mining. When I was a kid, we made our own fireworks and rockets from fertilizer, charcoal and sulphur. Also made plenty of H2 balloons with lye and aluminum foil in a flask or old Coke bottle. Ahh, those were the days…
 
Another good day. Not that I had that much anyway, but I processed and disposed of another gallon+ of liquid waste. No stray gold in this batch though. I did get some more positive results from some cheap gold plated jewelry that I picked up at the Thrift Store. I’m building a pretty good stock of gold rich solution to hopefully process into something substantive instead of just tiny bb’s. Thanks for the help, folks.
 
Edwin Price said:
When I was a kid, we made our own fireworks and rockets from fertilizer, charcoal and sulphur
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Oh Yeah😉
I seems to never grow up😂
I blow often over many hundreds kilo of Nitro/ANFO-based explosives every day at work 😃. I love the feeling when I wave the condensator igniter handle and push the button😎. The only boring is all the drilling 😅
/Dennis
 
Here’s a little bit of source material. Right now I have four workstations, a laptop, a couple cell phones and several already removed pcb’s to depopulate. I also have used some of my own gold ore, panning material and cheap gold plated jewelry. 👍
 

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Edwin Price said:
I have filtered out and collected a lot of solid waste material too. What process should I use to start potential recovery of any gold from that mess? Right now I am continuing to depopulate computer and electrical components. I'd appreciate input and advice from anyone on this forum. Thank you, edp
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I'm in a similar situation made a bunch of mistakes ended up with around 100 gallons of acidy liquid, so I decided to cement it all with zinc since some of the solution was hcl and bleach I was trying to drop palladium with smb, started reading C
M. Hokes book and learned so far how little I thought I knew and still have so much to learn I have a bunch of cemented out stuff at the bottom of my containers im trying to decide what to do with, as I'm out of nitric acid now as well lol the people here have been a major help
 
Moses said:
I'm in a similar situation made a bunch of mistakes ended up with around 100 gallons of acidy liquid, so I decided to cement it all with zinc since some of the solution was hcl and bleach I was trying to drop palladium with smb, started reading C
M. Hokes book and learned so far how little I thought I knew and still have so much to learn I have a bunch of cemented out stuff at the bottom of my containers im trying to decide what to do with, as I'm out of nitric acid now as well lol the people here have been a major help
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In the 80’s when a had a small lab setup in my then large basement, I made my own nitric acid from concentrated sulphuric acid and either potassium or sodium nitrate fertilizer. Heat and distill the gas into water. But you have to be extremely careful to make sure there are no leaks and that you have excellent ventilation as the orange colored nitrogen dioxide is extremely poisonous. I’ve also seen a few videos about making “poor man’s” nitric acid. I’ve learned via this forum and from Sreetips on YouTube to use only a fraction of the nitric acid I started out wasting. Good luck my friend. 👍
 
Edwin Price said:
Here’s a little bit of source material. Right now I have four workstations, a laptop, a couple cell phones and several already removed pcb’s to depopulate. I also have used some of my own gold ore, panning material and cheap gold plated jewelry. 👍
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Just a tip🙂
To avoid the metastannic doom, I always soak my depopulated Mobile phone boards in full strength Hcl, which takes care of the solder..
Got the tips from @Yggdrasil, my guru😅🙏🏻
That pretreatment has saved me a lot of work😉
/Dennis
 
Darkthirty said:
Cu $4.24 Lb - Sn $12.88 Lb Do you get rid of the copper also?
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Of course😂! Doesn’t you?
As for the solder, I meant to dissolve any residue, which could otherwise be a problem, just like I want to get rid of Cu as a base metal before refining.
But maybe I should stop giving tips and start trolling the threads instead🙄. /Dennis
 
Proffshuggarn said:
Of course😂! Doesn’t you?
As for the solder, I meant to dissolve any residue, which could otherwise be a problem, just like I want to get rid of Cu as a base metal before refining.
But maybe I should stop giving tips and start trolling the threads instead🙄. /Dennis
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You are joking right?
 

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