Australian E- Waste business thoughts and Ideas

[Exhail]

HI Guys

I know this topic has been bounced around a lot.

I have just been approached by the owner of one of the shops I pick up from about my thoughts of the feasibility of setting up an operation in which we would be looking at handling around 3-4 ton per week. the biggest questions are in relation to handling/ breakdown and processing. I know that there a few guys on here that cheery pick the high grade parts from boards and sell the rest off.

Now bare with me as it is only in the idea stage before picking me to pieces.

first thought is to start small 3-4 ton per week. ( free supply is not a issue)
Supply would be computers,laptops,tv's, pretty much any ewaste.
Plan is to strip out the easy money - heat sinks, copper,ram,cpu chips and any cards with gold fingers
keep ram and gold plate cards and the like and process them ourselves ( we know that if any money is to be made its not in the PGM's but in the lower grade metals)
All plastics we are looking at putting through a industrial chipper and selling to external buyers
Metals such as steel,copper,alloy,plastic coated wire etc... would be sent to a local scrap metal dealer.
Labor will be sourced locally and subsidized by the federal government through employment programs. (currently being used by the store owner)
We would also be looking at government funding grants for equipment and start up cost that are available

We would be looking a setting up a incineration furnace and a large volume HCL/H2O2 tank to process gold plated fingers and maybe a few H2So4 cells for pins, suitably equipped lab, waste solution handling and treatment tanks
One question we do have is would we be better of cheery picking and finding a buyer for the stripped boards and putting the boards through a PCB chipper and selling off that way.
At this point we are not concerned with legals,permits and the like we are just interested at this point is if it's feasible.

Just a little bit more info where we are based there is no other operation/plant within 1000 kilometers we have access to a large international port and would be looking at possibly getting local ex-government and telecommunications equipment as well.

Like I said only early days. Any other thoughts,ideas and criticism welcome. It would be good to here from some of the guys that do this kind of thing for a living.

 

[Lou]

I think you'll be at the mercy of Australia's tough environmental laws. You might have to get some politicians on your side. It's really an easy sell to the environmental people if you look at the net carbon benefit to recovery from concentrated sources such as these, relative to primary processing from even the richest of gold ore bodies.

Plan on being into this for a couple million to set it up properly at the small scale--to do it right at these prices, you need everything but the squeal out of the material. Send me a PM and maybe I can help.

 

[4metals]

I agree that you will need to be paid for plastics, copper, steel and aluminum as well as picking out any pieces with gold or PGM's. I don't agree with how you want to go about processing the pieces you have removed for precious metal recovery.

I have found that, at least in the US, there is a market for shredded or pelletized plastics BUT.... they have to be clean and all sorted by type. If you can do that, recycled plastics can pay handsomely.

For the circuit boards and chips I would set up a pyrolysis process, crush and sift what comes out after roasting the pyrolyzed material, and ship assayed powders as prepared sweeps and melt the oversized metallics with copper to either ship to a copper smelter or set up a copper electrolytic circuit to produce pure copper and concentrate the PM's.

These two types of end products containing PM's are both assayable by an in house lab capable of fire assay and with an instrumental capability. Although copper based bullion benefits from scorification it is still an in house process in a modest lab.

Using an acid leach or an electrolytic stripping cell for recovering values is a very niche specific process and you will likely be seeing a broad array of materials which will benefit from a standard process. As I have said before, engineers designing circuitry for electronics pay no attention to the recoverability of PM's after the useful life of the equipment. Layered, and therefore unexposed, circuitry and soldered pins all have values that are more difficult to recover. Copper based bullion gets my vote for the metallic fractions and prepared sweeps are both assayable and can be processed for very low rates by some of the majors in Europe.

 

[4metals]

What happened here? I thought this would be a good practical thread about processing e-scrap on a commercial scale. Nobody's talking?

 

[Anonymous]

Certainly 4metals.

To throw my 5 cents into the hat.

I process e-waste commercially in the UK. In our country we had dozens (edit: hundreds) of small companies start up during the gold boom a few years ago, and the vast majority of these are no more. My comments below are based upon the context that you are looking to do this as a legitimate business as opposed to working in your back yard as a one man band whilst under the radar of legislation.

Exhail, as Lou pointed out you have to take into consideration the relevant legislation and the commercial cost on your venture to conform to this when you are working out your cash flow forecasts. This is where many of the smaller firms over here went wrong. Three monthly inspections of your facility, weekly paperwork and returns to be filled out to the relevant environment agency, accountability for hazardous transfers, annual licence fees etc.

As 4metals mentioned there is a good market for plastics however (and it's a big however) there are many many different types of plastics in ewaste, only some of them having the best value and it takes one heck of a lot of ewaste to generate saleable quantities of these. To put this in perspective, even processing lorry loads of ewaste as we do, we are still not at the point where purchasing a shredder for plastics is financially viable. We simply stack it and sell it "as is" because it is not financially viable to pay to sort it to the level whereby it becomes a genuine income stream.

You also need to get your head around the sheer quantity of ewaste required, actually let me clarify that further - you need to get your head around the sheer quantity of high grade ewaste required to make a viable business given the cost of maintaining a compliant facility. I underline high grade for a reason. There is a fair percentage of ewaste that is classed merely as mixed weee, and sells for a mere £45 per metric tonne because it is simply too low a yield to warrant further processing on a commercial level. Add to this the items that you will need to actually pay to dispose of and it all adds to your overhead.

Theft is a problem if you use government programmes for employment, as is slow throughput, although this has to be balanced with your net cost per hour for the staff. I know that in Australia wages are in many cases even higher than the UK and you need to factor in how much it actually costs you per tonne to process the gear.

I'm happy to provide any pointers you need and hopefully you'll listen with an open attitude because operating in this area commercially is not the gold laying goose that many people perceive it to be.

Regards

Jon

 

[Anonymous]

Nah you're right 4metals, nobody is talking. Back to discussing how to make stannous chloride for the millionth time eh?

 

[rickbb]

Well I did look into starting up some type of e-waste recycle/reclaim business a couple of years back.

When I got the part of predicting a profit and the years of return on the investment, I stopped working on the project and resigned myself to be a hobbyist and left it at that.

Maybe why that's also why this conversation has stopped as well.

 

[4metals]

Exhail had written a thoughtful post explaining his source of materials and his thoughts about handling the material. 3 to 4 tons a week is not like a hobbyist collector.

I was hoping this could develop into an interesting thread fully discussing all processing options. That type of thread would benefit a good number of our members and that is why I try to encourage threads of this type.

But the OP's original interest seems to have waned. Too bad, we all lose when that happens.