adlestuu,
My first question is what is your plan to treat the toxic waste generated.
How are you protecting yourself and others from the toxic dust, or the toxic gases, liquids or salts you will plan on generating?
Do you have a good understanding of what will be generated and how to keep yourself or others around you safe from these?
Can you keep these out of our wells and rivers of the water people in Oregon drink?
Can you clean up this toxic material you have on your land now, and make it safer? Or would you make it into more of a toxic mess trying to get a few grams of gold?
Sulfuric acid will dissolve many metals, (which ones can be dependent on the concentration of the acid), you will put some metals in solution as sulfates, and some metals will be left as insoluble sulfate salts (lead for example) with the other insoluble materials, and minor amounts of values.
Besides the question of how to treat the toxic solutions safely once produced, what is your plan to remove the toxic lead sulfate and other salts from the bulk of the insoluble material, how will you treat this for disposal where you are not putting others in harms way with the toxic waste generated through this process and the processes that follow to get a few grams of value from a pile of ashes?
There can be several methods to extract the values, some methods may be easier than others, some may cost more than others, some will generate more toxic waste, or toxic gases than others.
Yes you may come up with a plan of operation, will you make money doing it? Do you have the education needed to complete the process safely?
But before you can make a dime, you will need to understand the different processes that can be used, understand each of the steps involved,in each of these processes and the subsequent processes involved from recovery to refining, and how to deal with the waste caused by these steps.
Then you may have to experiment with these different processes to determine which may work best for your material.
At this point I do not see that you have a pile of values, I see you have a pile of burnt circuit boards, a toxic mess on your hands, with a fairly good understanding of how to recover and refine you could possibly turn this toxic ash into a few dollars, and do it safely for you and others around you, but without a good education of how or an understanding of all of the steps and chemical reactions involved, you could just make this toxic mess you have now into a bigger toxic mess.
My suggestion, at this point I think you should clean up the burnt circuit boards bag them and put them in barrels for proper disposal (to keep these toxic metals out of our drinking water), or store them (out of the weather, to keep them out of our environment), until you have a better understanding of how to determine the best way to deal with them, and determine if they are even worth the trouble, and also have an understanding of the toxic waste generated and how to deal with it.
To learn I suggest Hokes book, and her getting acquainted experiments, the forum (guide to the forum in the general chat section is a good place to start), and the safety section with special attention on dealing with waste.
Starting your learning curve with a material much easier to deal with than a pile of burnt circuit boards like memory fingers and collecting gold foils and learning to refine them, working your way up as you gain more understanding to the harder materials and processes.
Yes as in the title of this thread a big mess to clean up now, and I suggest study before getting into a bigger mess.
