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ersurfer

New member
Joined
Dec 8, 2014
Messages
2
Hey Guys,

I have poked around a bit on the forums, but this is my first post. I really appreciate all of the knowledge in this forum, I can tell there are a lot of awesome people here.

My question(s) is rather broad, but here it goes: I have a friend who runs a non-profit which collects donated (free) e-waste from small--->large institutions. All of it is donated. As of now, they process the e-waste (take computers apart using cheap labor) and re-sell it. My friend came to me asking about gold recovery from the e-waste because I am a chemist and he thought I would have some knowledge. Well, I didn't, so I did some quick research and what I found is that it could be worthwhile. If I could process 5-10 lbs/day of cut fingers, that would yield roughly 5-20g of gold/day (assuming cut fingers yield 1-2g of gold/lb). I figure I could do this, if it was my full time job.

I realize that the cost of chemicals will weigh into the feasibility of this venture, as well as disposal. If I were doing 10 lb batches in 5 gallon buckets should I use the HCl+H2O2 or HCl+CuCl+O2 method? Of course I will be re-using the etching solutions, which would be a better choice for re-use? After the initial foil extraction, I plan on dissolving in Nitric Acid and precipitating with SMB, filtering, then melting in crucible.

I will start by doing 1LB batches in my backyard to get the process down. I've been a chemist for 8 years so after reading some of the tutorials and threads I don't feel it will be too difficult, but I understand there is a learning curve none-the-less. It will take time to learn the process and I have the means to do this. After getting the process down, the non-profit said they will rent out a lab space for me to move into with proper ventilation, permits, etc...

I don't have a lot of options right now for work, I have been out of work since August due to cut backs at my company. The job market here is not so great, I have been looking for the last 3 months to no avail. I feel like this could be a good opportunity for me, but also realize it might be a dead end/pipe dream.

Pros:
Source material is free and plentiful
All equipment and reagents are paid for
I will get 25% of final weight of gold

Cons:
I have no experience in this field
They currently sell the ram boards uncut, if profit from gold extraction doesn't exceed current method of selling ram boards, my job will be deleted.

Any input is much appreciated. Thanks and have a wonderful day!

-ersurfer-
 
5-10 pounds a day? It takes a lot of cards/memory to get that many fingers in a day. If you are getting that much a day, you should just broker the material into a place that refines professionally and just get a cut. That's a lot of fingers.
 
5-10 lbs (2.5-5 kg) per day is a huge amount of scrap. The fingers from a PCI card is 2-3 grams and from a memory module less than a gram. An average PC would give less than 5 grams of fingers. To get 2.5 - 5 kg of fingers you would have to dismantle at least 500-1000 PC:s per day. That's at least a semi trailer per day filled with PC:s.

With that amount of scrap you would classify as a major scrap producer and could sell the scrap circuit boards directly to a refinery and getting paid on the full content of gold, silver, palladium and copper (minus a percentage). Skipping any intermediate collector who takes quite a lot in between their purchase price and what they get from the refinery.

Now, I have a hard time to think that a non-profit would reach those volumes on donated PC:s, so this is more of a reality check.
Since you are out of work (sorry to hear) you should bring a scale and pen and paper to this place and make a thorough study for a day or week, counting how many PC:s and other scrap items comes in, measuring the separate weight of all power supplies, main boards, pci boards and ram modules. Remove any fingers and weigh the total. Then you should have a more solid base to make any decisions on what to do.
Publish your numbers here and I'll take a quick look at them. I think your current ideas are pipe dreams but there might be another route to take.

For a good idea on how to classify different boards, look at http://boardsort.com/payout.php It will also give an indication on how much the minimum value of the scrap is.

Göran
 
As others have said, it takes a lot of computers to yield that many fingers. There are other components in the PCs that have as much, or more gold content as the fingers. But if they're already selling the scrap, it may be difficult to make more by processing than by selling it on.
ersurfer said:
I realize that the cost of chemicals will weigh into the feasibility of this venture, as well as disposal. If I were doing 10 lb batches in 5 gallon buckets should I use the HCl+H2O2 or HCl+CuCl+O2 method? Of course I will be re-using the etching solutions, which would be a better choice for re-use? After the initial foil extraction, I plan on dissolving in Nitric Acid and precipitating with SMB, filtering, then melting in crucible.
If you continue to study here, you'll find that the HCl + H2O2 process (often referred to as the AP (acid peroxide) process) is the same as the CuCl2 process (what you referred to as the HCl+CuCl+O2 method). There are many threads here that discuss the chemistry.

I don't think you'll have much success trying to dissolve the foils in nitric acid, as nitric alone will not dissolve more than a trace amount of gold. HCl and nitric, HCl and bleach, or HCl and strong H2O2 will work.

Dave
 
When you study the AP, (HCL/H2O2), process you'll see that it can take up to a week or more to get clean gold foils off of fingers. If you plan on processing poundage per day you will soon be overwhelmed with buckets of acid and air bubblers sitting around all over the place.

If your plan was to do this in 5 gallon buckets and you are really getting pounds of fingers a day, I think you need to re-think your plan.
 
if you know what they sell for, can you not buy from them, removing the hi grade components & resell the rest ?

then you could replace your job for your own business ? just a thought.

there is more to be made then just gold.
 
If you are getting 5 lbs of fingers a day you can take a 20 gallon plastic container and put the fingers in there with HCL and an air bubbler (no need to add peroxide). Put enough HCL to cover the fingers. At the end of the day put the newly cut fingers in the container and add just enough HCL to keep the fingers covered. At the end of about 2 weeks your container should be full and all of the fingers should be processed and ready to remove them from the container and recover the gold foils and refine the gold.
 
Since you have the time on your hands, unfortunately, and you are a chemist, this could be a wonderful opportunity to gain experience in refining if the numbers work out as Goran said. I would venture to say if you process these parts yourself and get your 25% you will give a better return than a large refiner would give. Plus you could cherry pick and get the higher yielding processors to process as well. This forum is a great site to figure out what the yields run on most anything in a computer.

After you get the hang of refining e-scrap you can dabble in karat scrap and use your experience to apply for work at a precious metal refiner. You would be surprised how few refiners actually have a chemist on staff, which considering all processing is done chemically, has always baffled me.

What type of chemistry is your specialty? If it's analytical it is definitely an option.

Good luck
 
Hey thanks for the replies everyone. It seems that the general consensus is that it would take a ridiculous amount of computers/scrap to be able to make enough money from this to provide for my living expenses.. I need to figure out what type of e-waste this non-profit usually comes across to better asses my situation. At the least, I can do some processing on the side for them but it doesn't seem like it would be feasible for a full time job. I'm going to get a better idea of what they get paid for various types of e-waste and see if that might be a better route than gold extraction.

Thanks again for the input.
 
Good luck and welcome aboard. In a multitude of counselors there is wisdom.

I will be meeting with a local salvage yard for the second time On the 5th, tomorrow, They collect the E waste from the 3 surrounding states and they have it piled high. Our last meeting was over an hour and a half. I'm still trying to decide how to help with the over whelming pile of computers, printers, CRT's and who knows what else. Skid after skid. The last meeting went well, they seem to be very receptive. In short I break them down for the RAM, riser cards and expansion cards, the so called high grade material. The rest they keep and sell. I'm still not sure how that might work out for me.
 
joekbit said:
Good luck and welcome aboard. In a multitude of counselors there is wisdom.

I will be meeting with a local salvage yard for the second time On the 5th, tomorrow, They collect the E waste from the 3 surrounding states and they have it piled high. Our last meeting was over an hour and a half. I'm still trying to decide how to help with the over whelming pile of computers, printers, CRT's and who knows what else. Skid after skid. The last meeting went well, they seem to be very receptive. In short I break them down for the RAM, riser cards and expansion cards, the so called high grade material. The rest they keep and sell. I'm still not sure how that might work out for me.

It's not going to work out well for you at all. Problem is you are going to assume that every computer you open up will have ram and cards inside. I can tell you that will not happen. Many times techs and owners will pull the ram and cards out of towers to use in others, or as spares. Every time you open one up and those items are missing, you are working for nothing. Printers and crts are money losers. If you have a free labor force to do the work, then maybe you might have something. Best thing you could do if focus on the computers/servers/network gear only and leave the rest of the stuff out of the deal.
 
With my little experience, in my area, about a quarter of personal computers will have either the CPU or RAM, rarely they have both.
Most, instead, will have a graphic card, a network card etc..
 
silversaddle1 said:
It's not going to work out well for you at all. Problem is you are going to assume that every computer you open up will have ram and cards inside. I can tell you that will not happen. Many times techs and owners will pull the ram and cards out of towers to use in others, or as spares. Every time you open one up and those items are missing, you are working for nothing. Printers and crts are money losers. If you have a free labor force to do the work, then maybe you might have something. Best thing you could do if focus on the computers/servers/network gear only and leave the rest of the stuff out of the deal.

This is exactly what I do, I'm the guy that builds and fixes all the computing hardware and networking systems as my day job. Any dead gear is stripped of anything considered high value or could be used as spare parts. When I'm done with them all that left is steel, plastic and glass.
 
Thanks for the input. Our meeting today did not go far. It was very short due to the amount of activity. One thing I did make clear was I can't work for free. He agreed. So we got that part understood. My hope is we can come to an agreement and sell it on the internet. He seems to have very little knowledge of how to do that, I could handle that for a percentage.

Nothing ventured nothing gained. If we find high grade material we can make a decision on what to do with it from there. One thing at a time. The income potential on the internet is by far the highest.
 
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