# Shredded Boards what to do?



## amxfan (Mar 10, 2012)

I have approximately 350 to 500 shredded motherboards. These boards had the processor removed "I have the processors" before shredding. I'm thinking the processes I should do is:
1. Incinerate the boards.
2. Go over the ash with a magnet.
3. Leech? Not sure with what though.
4. No clue.

I have never processed anything other than fingers from memory and I'm not sure where to start with this batch to recover as much as possible. I'm also thinking of a cyanide leech, but again I'm not sure if that is the best way. Of course gold recovery is my primary goal but I would also like to recover the copper, silver, platinum, aluminum etc.
Lastly I have about 350-500 hard drives and CD/DVD roms. I'm going to strip the hard drives down and was planing on processing the boards from the drives in the same manner as I do the shredded material. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the CD/DVD roms. I may just sell them off as is. This batch did not cost me anything, so anything I get is a plus. 
I am hoping someone here will be in a kindhearted mood and is willing to help a want-a-be recycler with a bit of guidance with how to process these boards.

Note:
I would also like to thank everyone here for the help so far. My last question on how to deal with plastic was well received, although I'm not reclaiming the vapor from the melting plastic and using it for fuel. I have found a way to eliminate all of my plastic issues and make money from it. Best of all it all stays out of the landfill.


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## ericrm (Mar 10, 2012)

to what i know ,recent mother board have around 4-5 $ lbs of pm in them ,if you dont have the right setting behind you your in a bad position right now. i dont deal with most mobo for this reason ,im not equip to do so...
dont forget that a lot of value is with magnetic material ,nickel in plating, steel on connector case.

you should start looking for someone who as the volume to deal with refiner ... i think edi in ontario shred everything down and ship in belgium. try to deal something with them or someone who deal that way.

was your material free of batterie and excesive steel? describ it as much accurate as you can here and hope for the best


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## amxfan (Mar 11, 2012)

Thanks for the reply.
The batteries were removed before shredding along with all steel "except for the CPU clamps". I was given the whole systems, including case. I was also there when the shredding was done. "I'm not sure why but the company wanted to shred the items before they gave them to me. My boy and myself disassembled the systems". I have been stockpiling for a while now and would like to get whatever equipment is needed a little at a time. Right now though I'm not real sure on what is needed. What I have been doing so far is selling the cases off for steel and selling the gold from the fingers and also selling the working cd/dvd roms and reinvesting the money on items needed for processing. I would like to eventually buy or make everything needed so I can stop selling items and start keeping everything myself for processing. I do have a recycling license and also sell refurbished systems. The main thing stopping me from doing more is knowledge. Learning this stuff is a very slow process, but that is okay as I will stockpile items until I obtain what I need. Right now I get an average of 45 systems per month. This is not including miscellaneous electronic scrap like cables, laser disc players, projectors, monitors etc. 
What I would love to do is partner with a refinery that is close...I give them the scrap, they give me the knowledge. Issue...there are none close. The closest one is 2 hours away.


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## amxfan (Mar 16, 2012)

I did not think I would get a reply to this but that's okay. All I was looking for was the over all process of how this type of product was handled and what equipment would be needed. 
Anyways thanks for the help


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## Harold_V (Mar 16, 2012)

Processing boards is not done easily for the small refiner. That's the reason they are normally sold. The issues you'd face may be difficult to overcome. As I understand the process, they are incinerated, solids then separated from the fines, solids melted and sent to a copper refinery for recovery of values and base metals. Fines can be processed by leaching. 

Not suggesting that you aren't capable, but you may be biting off a lot more than you care to chew---and you'll still be stuck with the loss of some of the base metals that would most likely be recovered by major refiners. All in all, selling boards can be in your best interest.

Please verify anything I've said here. I may not have a full understanding of the process. I didn't handle boards, or escrap in general.

Harold


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## patnor1011 (Mar 16, 2012)

You are correct Harold. Nobody can profitably recover values from motherboards in back yard. You can cherry-pick values and process those but I have yet to see somebody accomplishing what large companies are doing with profit. It simply cant be done. You either lose values, endanger yourself and pollute environment, create tremendous amount of waste solutions, lose time .... well pretty much everything what I mentioned. 

To the OP question as for what to do? Try to go through your shredded boards and pick pins, flatpacks, fingers and try to process those. Try to sell the rest.


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## NoIdea (Mar 17, 2012)

Hi - any chance of a picture of the shredded material please. 

I am currently working a process for doing such beasts.

Most of your focus should centered on safety and then your waste stream, be it gasses, liquids and solids

Cheers

Deano


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## amxfan (Mar 18, 2012)

@Harold_V 
I agree with everything you are saying, and to be honest at this point in time I am not capable. I do not have the amount of knowledge necessary. And yes I am biting off more than I can chew at this point in time. What I am planning on doing is basically what I have been doing. I am going to keep selling the boards, cd roms and other materials. I am going to take the money I get from that and reinvest it in equipment.

From everything I have been reading, the basic steps I was gathering were 
incinerate
add borax to molten pot
electrowin

Reading your response, I would say your method makes more sense.

@NoIdea
I will try and get you pictures as soon as I can. Also I stated a couple posts ago that I am not recapturing the fumes from the plastics and using it for fuel. I cannot remember what that method was called. What I found, you take all the plastic from the computers and the keyboards, you run them through your make-shift mill until you get very small pieces / dust. What I have found was people that install decorative stone sidewalks use plastic material like this as it displaces water better than sand, and it does not wash away. This is where all my plastic now goes. I really don't get squat for it, but I do not have to pay to dispose of it and what I get does cover my gas and electric to produce the material. Just an idea if you want to pursue those means of eliminating your plastic.

@general topic
Since I get 99% of my stuff for free, at this point I am not real concerned about not getting 100% of the value out of it, as long as I get more out of it than I would if I sell it to a refinery. I have dealt with boardsort in the past, and I am quite pleased with them, they offer very fair prices and are very easy to deal with, but when you take shipping into account, and deduct it from what you get, looking at it that way I can refine the boards myself, lose 25% of the reclaimable material, and still make more. This by no means is any put down towards boardsort, as they offer very fair prices, but it is what it is. I have found that the idiots on ebay might be a better offload source. How they are making money I have no clue, when they are paying $2.00 to $3.00 for a newer blank motherboard.

Anyways, I do very much appreciate this forum and everything that I have learned from it, and I thank all of you for the replies and guidance.


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## patnor1011 (Mar 19, 2012)

Check this thread from 3 years ago:
http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=4337

Boards are complicated matter. You cant just incinerate them. Way too much of toxic substances inside like flame retardants, dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), cadmium, beryllium, chromium, radioactive isotopes, mercury, lead tin solder..... Do you really think you are able to burn them without getting whiff of that from time to time? I am by no means green or save the planet warrior it just makes no sense for me to voluntarily breath all that shiz myself or somebody from my family, neighbours.
Problem is that if you do not have proper and I mean PROPER equipment which burn everything including smoke and catch everything not that you endanger yourself, you will be losing values going off in smoke. Proper set up goes for hundreds of thousands and that is why there is a lot of middle man like boardsort in business. They accumulate stuff for big boys with millions in hardware.

While I created pdf about recovery from flatpack chip packages with using incineration, I will never even dream that something similar can be done by any of us with motherboards. Not without compromising our own or somebody else's health and even if you will use gas mask and do it in some remote part to ensure no living soul is around all those chemicals end up in air, water and ground and eventually somebody will suffer.

To your steps - I have said what I think about incineration so lets talk about second one - add borax to molten pot. One sentence only - Borax is not your silver bullet. Way too many different fluxes can be and will have to be used to ensure complete, homogeneous and proper melt.

Electrowin? I don't know what is your knowledge or experience with this process but from what I gathered it is so complex, that it is well beyond being able to grasp on even basic procedures within months. It requires years of study and practice to be capable to effectively extract all of metals you mentioned you want to extract. 

I do not want to discourage you, by no means not. I like challenges myself. I just want to point that sometimes things looks nice in our head and ideas but are very far from reality and when reality bites it can be very bad. 
Few bad experiments with incineration and small exposure to some of mentioned substances are all what is needed to wish you never heard about gold in computers.

But who knows, I may be wrong...


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## NoIdea (Mar 19, 2012)

Afternoon All - Its time for me to jump in here, me thinkith. :lol: 



patnor1011 said:


> Boards are complicated matter. You cant just incinerate them. Way too much of toxic substances inside like flame retardants, dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), cadmium, beryllium, chromium, radioactive isotopes, mercury, lead tin solder..... Do you really think you are able to burn them without getting whiff of that from time to time? I am by no means green or save the planet warrior it just makes no sense for me to voluntarily breath all that shiz myself or somebody from my family, neighbours.



patnor1011 is correct "DO NOT INCINERATE BOARDS"

1-It is imparitive that pyrolysis is performed first before incineration and to completion. If not done to completion, nasties will still remain, and your final pyrolysed product should be dusty not fluffy after grinding.
2-Pyrolysis gases MUST be fed directly into the burner, providing additional heat to destroy PCB's, dioxn,s, etc.
3-All gases MUST go through a scrubber
4-Incineration gases MUST go through a scrubber.




patnor1011 said:


> Electrowin? I don't know what is your knowledge or experience with this process but from what I gathered it is so complex, that it is well beyond being able to grasp on even basic procedures within months. It requires years of study and practice to be capable to effectively extract all of metals you mentioned you want to extract.



To be honest, its a lot easyer than one thinks, if you are not worried about grainy copper deposits and use a terracotta pot for your anode compartment, creating a very good membrane separating anode from cathode, then Bingo. Voltage and current play a big part, high voltages > 6VDC can cause co-deposits, especially if your copper concentration is too low or high concentration of impurities in the mix(both can be controlled), and low currents make things go really really slow. :lol: 



patnor1011 said:


> I just want to point that sometimes things looks nice in our head and ideas but are very far from reality and when reality bites it can be very bad.



Ha Ha Ha for me thats so close to the truth, living is learning, though some learning may not lead to living :mrgreen: 



patnor1011 said:


> Few bad experiments with incineration and small exposure to some of mentioned substances are all what is needed to wish you never heard about gold in computers.



Patnor1011 - Well put, Health is first, these gases are deadly and need to be treated as such.

This forum is filled with stories of chemicals drifting into our atmosphere, from one process or the other, i for one am guilty on more than one occasion. After reading several times by HAROLD, his recovery of many a dollar from cleaning his extraction filters was enough for me to concentrate on gas scrubbers and filters more than i am. Its a shame it took dollar signs for me to take extra steps in ensuring good scrubbing/filtering of off gases. 



patnor1011 said:


> But who knows, I may be wrong...



"Wrong" .... Nah, are you having a bad day? :mrgreen:


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## butcher (Mar 20, 2012)

I agree with patnor and NoIdea, I also suspect the ash is extremely dangerous, even if we could re-burn the gases capture all of the combustion products in a safe controlled manner, which I believe could only happen inside a bubble.

It may also not matter if you did do everything in a safe controlled manner,
Capturing every particle of the waste product of combustion, and the processes involved, handled everything perfectly safely for yourself others and for the environment, and treated the waste perfectly, as well, if the men in black paid you a visit, you may still have a hard time explaining the chemistry to them, he may have his own Ideas how things work.

Industry follows guidelines concerning waste products, they may have stricter guidelines than we do in some ways, or they may actually be more tolerant in other aspects, also in many way’s we may find, we just may be at the mercy of an individual’s discretion in judgment of what we are doing is safe and legal, or not.

The whole idea of burning or incinerating anything should not be taken lightly, or without consideration of all of the consequences.


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## rpg (Dec 6, 2012)

sorry for reopening this thread. A few days ago I run into a presentation this year on a metal recovery from PCBs. Incineration is a dangerous high pollution process. Pyrolysis of plastics is a process I'm very familiar with, it must be done in a Oxygen free kiln. In the end you'll be left with a mesh of coke, glass and metals. The coke created is about 3% per weight of plastic.

What the author of the presentation proposes is

crushing PCB to 1.5mm 
-> separate metals from non metals via a corona electrostatic
-> further separate any left over via a concentrator
-> magnetic extraction of ferrous metals from the mesh
->dissolution of non target metals (gold, silver, palladium and copper) via a sulfuric acid bath
-> dissolve the target metals in aqua regia
-> recover metals via EMEW cells in the following order: Copper, Gold, Palladium, Silver

I've seen the EMEW cells at work on youtube and they are really a beauty. Not sure if I can post the document here and I no longer have the original link.


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## rpg (Dec 6, 2012)

just FYI and according to study I mention, the expected recovery rates are:

"Calculations using the data obtained from current statistics
showed that 0.044 kg of gold, 0.18 kg of silver, 0.010 kg of
palladium and 21 kg of copper can be recovered from 125 kg
of PCBs."

This is worth about $2800 or about $10 a pound


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## NoIdea (Dec 6, 2012)

rpg said:


> sorry for reopening this thread. A few days ago I run into a presentation this year on a metal recovery from PCBs. Incineration is a dangerous high pollution process. Pyrolysis of plastics is a process I'm very familiar with, it must be done in a Oxygen free kiln. In the end you'll be left with a mesh of coke, glass and metals. The coke created is about 3% per weight of plastic.
> 
> What the author of the presentation proposes is
> 
> ...



One of the things i am working on is the reduction of the metal fractions partical size by oxidation, producing a low density mud which washes away easly and a high density PM fraction. Sort of like oxidation panning  .

Deano


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## rpg (Dec 7, 2012)

sounds very interestiging. Keep us posted


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## kjavanb123 (Jun 7, 2013)

What if one could dismantle parts of boards that are gold plated and process those accordingly? Eachmotherboard consists of all slots, n/s bridges, ICs, connector ports, which can be removed crushed abd shredded to get the pin out


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## Tinker Terry (Jun 9, 2013)

My first concern would be distilling the mercury. As much to keep it out of the environment and for safety as for profit. Have been thinking about shredding boards and chips and then running them firs through a bath of boiling water with lye, which does a fair job of delaminating the boards, makinkig it easy to separate the fingers and other metals. Question is would an old stainless steel pressure cooker be a good material to use for distilling mercury. Hoke says use glass and iron. Pressure cooker is pefect for connecting pies to, it has a well sealed lid with openings for attaching. Would the mercury vapors react with stainless steel pot. Can get stainless steel brake lines easily enough. Have also been experimenting with electrolysis on a very small scale. Much math to work out. But things are proceeding well.


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## Pantherlikher (Jun 9, 2013)

Personally, I would manually sort the good stuff out. Chips, pins, etc. and ship the rest.
You would get a lot more out for a return that way, without going through all the crap and wastes and gasses and problems.
Spend a day and dump a pile onto a table and see what "looks good" to you. You should have an idea what's "easy" and what's not worth the troubles.
You could Fleabay pins and make a nice chunka change; cutting down on the total shipping charges while cherry picking what you know you can handle now or in the future.

If you tare down the PCs and watch them shred, you could save all memory, fingerboards, and anything else that's good. Then give them the crap as 1st shred, finger boards next and finally memory if they require everything shredded. That way you can keep track of where the good stuff is and have it concentrated so you save time and effort sorting through all of it.


B.S.
Just my light bulb bursting brightly for a moment... now it's gone.


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## g_axelsson (Jun 9, 2013)

Tinker Terry said:


> My first concern would be distilling the mercury. As much to keep it out of the environment and for safety as for profit. Have been thinking about shredding boards and chips and then running them firs through a bath of boiling water with lye, which does a fair job of delaminating the boards, makinkig it easy to separate the fingers and other metals. Question is would an old stainless steel pressure cooker be a good material to use for distilling mercury. Hoke says use glass and iron. Pressure cooker is pefect for connecting pies to, it has a well sealed lid with openings for attaching. Would the mercury vapors react with stainless steel pot. Can get stainless steel brake lines easily enough. Have also been experimenting with electrolysis on a very small scale. Much math to work out. But things are proceeding well.


This is wrong in so many levels I can't give a good answer.

Never connect pies to a mercury distilling rig! :shock: 

Göran


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## squarecoinman (Jun 10, 2013)

Tinker Terry said:


> My first concern would be distilling the mercury. As much to keep it out of the environment and for safety as for profit. Have been thinking about shredding boards and chips and then running them firs through a bath of boiling water with lye, which does a fair job of delaminating the boards, makinkig it easy to separate the fingers and other metals. Question is would an old stainless steel pressure cooker be a good material to use for distilling mercury. Hoke says use glass and iron. Pressure cooker is pefect for connecting pies to, it has a well sealed lid with openings for attaching. Would the mercury vapors react with stainless steel pot. Can get stainless steel brake lines easily enough. Have also been experimenting with electrolysis on a very small scale. Much math to work out. But things are proceeding well.




What mercury ? a few days ago other members here have already explained to you that only on very old boards you may find components that have some mercury in them.
all of them send it to hazardous waste processing. You will have a hard time to find enough components to process. 

To answer your question very clear NO one should not use a pressure cooker for processing Mercury, if you wonder why read the safety section. 
In the old days pressure cookers where used to cook potatoes, make amphetamine, and make bombs.

scm


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## patnor1011 (Jun 10, 2013)

Mercury in recovering gold from electronic scrap? Like fingers or pins? :shock: 

And I thought I heard it all already...:roll:


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