E-Waste using no chemicals - Can it be done?

[Sancho_n_Pedro]

I was wondering, as I've been playing with my furnace just recently, If I take the obvious bits away (aluminum) and then throw everything else into my furnace, it will melt everything into a mixed metal block containing copper, steel, nickel, silver, gold.
If I put these into suitably sized blocks and use cupellation to remove all but the noble metals, would you say that this is a somewhat safer method that the wet route?

And by going this route, would you say that you should be collecting all the noble metals, or will there be losses?
Or would the suggestion be to follow the HCL route first to eliminate some of the metals to begin with?

 

[Yggdrasil]

I was wondering, as I've been playing with my furnace just recently, If I take the obvious bits away (aluminum) and then throw everything else into my furnace, it will melt everything into a mixed metal block containing copper, steel, nickel, silver, gold.
If I put these into suitably sized blocks and use cupellation to remove all but the noble metals, would you say that this is a somewhat safer method that the wet route?

And by going this route, would you say that you should be collecting all the noble metals, or will there be losses?
Or would the suggestion be to follow the HCL route first to eliminate some of the metals to begin with?

If you do a good magnetic separation after the incineration you will get rid of most of the Iron.

Still, the cupelling has its own issues regarding pollution.

There will be less waste treatment though.
Maybe better with a Copper cell?

 

[kurtak]

I was wondering, as I've been playing with my furnace just recently, If I take the obvious bits away (aluminum) and then throw everything else into my furnace, it will melt everything into a mixed metal block containing copper, steel, nickel, silver, gold.

It is not that simple !!!!!

You can not just throw some circuit boards in a furnace & expect that they will melt into a chunk of metal that can then be processed for the PMs

There is more to it - a LOT more to it

The quick answer (steps) to the process -----------

The CBs first need to be shredded (so need to be run through a knife mill or hammer mill)

The shredded CBs then need to be incinerated to turn the organics (plastics) into carbon/ash

The incinerated shredded CBs then need to be re-milled in a ball mill

After ball milling it needs to go through a sifting/screening process - this separates over sized part from above process (which needs re-processing &/or other processing) from smaller size the goes to the next process of smelting

Smelting the smaller size that goes through sifting/screening then needs to be mixed with flux to slag off organics (carbon/ash) as well as "some" metal oxides - & as well the likely addition of a "collector" metal to the smelt to insure all metals collect together & don't get hung up in the flux/slag

That is the short story - for a more complete understanding read this thread --------------

https://goldrefiningforum.com/threads/smelting.25592/

And as well watch this video (the one titled "incineration process") ---------

https://www.advchem.com/videos

Kurt

 

[Sancho_n_Pedro]

Sorry, was meaning once depopulated.

Will check them links shortly (out watching my daughter play football)

 

[Yggdrasil]

Sorry, was meaning once depopulated.

Will check them links shortly (out watching my daughter play football)

Give her some inspiring support

 

[KKRRenewables]

My daughter plays high school flag football and loves it. I swear the girls need protective equipment more than a padded helmet, they seem to want to hit each other pretty badly. Hahahaa. Good luck to your daughter!!

 

[Yggdrasil]

My daughter plays high school flag football and loves it. I swear the girls need protective equipment more than a padded helmet, they seem to want to hit each other pretty badly. Hahahaa. Good luck to your daughter!!

In the world outside the northern America, football is played with the feet
and one have no padding since no hitting, beating, pushing and likewise is allowed

 

[Manji Manii]

I was wondering, as I've been playing with my furnace just recently, If I take the obvious bits away (aluminum) and then throw everything else into my furnace, it will melt everything into a mixed metal block containing copper, steel, nickel, silver, gold.
If I put these into suitably sized blocks and use cupellation to remove all but the noble metals, would you say that this is a somewhat safer method that the wet route?

And by going this route, would you say that you should be collecting all the noble metals, or will there be losses?
Or would the suggestion be to follow the HCL route first to eliminate some of the metals to begin with?

Since you are equipped to deal with high temperature metal working, I would recommend taking the following steps.

1. Depopulate
2. Run a ceramic magnet through the material and pick up the nickel containing pieces.
3. Grind what is left into powder with a coffee grinder, use a espresso grinder.
4. Weigh the material and take equal amounts of zinc oxide and aluminum dust and mix it together. (Alternately, you can take the weight in aluminum foil plus the same in zinc oxide powder plus the grind and roll the foil with a strip of magnesium diagonally along the inside of the roll with the powder in the center, aluminum is flammable as foil.)
5. With a strip of magnesium ribbon as a fuse, put the mixture in a crucible and ignite the mixture using the magnesium fuse. Or light the fuse on the roll inside of a crucible, like you would use for iron smelting, not a little one ounce thing.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272884217320977#:~:text=The above-mentioned values reveal,In fact,


The aluminum will burn off at a temperature in excess of the evaporation point of zinc metal leaving behind aluminum oxide and a blob of metal at the bottom of the crucible that will be predominantly silver, gold, copper and palladium. The rest will be aluminum oxide.

Just sell it as is. Somebody will pay you a lot more money than doing anything more would cost you.

If it is a smartphone, the mainboard PCB will be a gold and silver alloy, not copper, shred tablet, phone and small electronics boards and mix them in with the thermite and burn off the cellulose in the process, but this will make the mix burn hot and smokey.

As for fingers, containing a layer of gold on nickel layered on copper, believe it or not, but you can just sell those on eBay for about what you would expect to get by going through some process to extract the gold at home without chemicals.

Hope this helps, zinc oxide is cheap and aluminum foil is even cheaper and you can spend $20 in materials to extract up to 1 kilo of ewaste alloy.

 

[Yggdrasil]

Since you are equipped to deal with high temperature metal working, I would recommend taking the following steps.

1. Depopulate
2. Run a ceramic magnet through the material and pick up the nickel containing pieces.
3. Grind what is left into powder with a coffee grinder, use a espresso grinder.
4. Weigh the material and take equal amounts of zinc oxide and aluminum dust and mix it together. (Alternately, you can take the weight in aluminum foil plus the same in zinc oxide powder plus the grind and roll the foil with a strip of magnesium diagonally along the inside of the roll with the powder in the center, aluminum is flammable as foil.)
5. With a strip of magnesium ribbon as a fuse, put the mixture in a crucible and ignite the mixture using the magnesium fuse. Or light the fuse on the roll inside of a crucible, like you would use for iron smelting, not a little one ounce thing.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272884217320977#:~:text=The above-mentioned values reveal,In fact,


The aluminum will burn off at a temperature in excess of the evaporation point of zinc metal leaving behind aluminum oxide and a blob of metal at the bottom of the crucible that will be predominantly silver, gold, copper and palladium. The rest will be aluminum oxide.

Just sell it as is. Somebody will pay you a lot more money than doing anything more would cost you.

If it is a smartphone, the mainboard PCB will be a gold and silver alloy, not copper, shred tablet, phone and small electronics boards and mix them in with the thermite and burn off the cellulose in the process, but this will make the mix burn hot and smokey.

As for fingers, containing a layer of gold on nickel layered on copper, believe it or not, but you can just sell those on eBay for about what you would expect to get by going through some process to extract the gold at home without chemicals.

Hope this helps, zinc oxide is cheap and aluminum foil is even cheaper and you can spend $20 in materials to extract up to 1 kilo of ewaste alloy.

I don't quite know how to reply to this.
Thermite creates a really strong heat and as such probably will destroy the crucible.
Next the mix needs to be in mixed powder as a foil around an unknown amount of ground powder will fizz out really fast.
The active powder(Al/ZnO in this case)need to be well mixed and relatively pure, which means you do not want to dilute the thermite itself too much with inactive elements as the thermite reaction will stall as well.
So you will end up with massive uncontrollable volcano just to melt a little motherboard dust.
So it will be like spending Dollars to receive minute amounts of cents.

There are already established and effective methods to refine boards as Kurt described further up.
And boards do not contain much more than Copper and tiny amounts of Gold and Silver.
So this is used to recover the Copper and any PMs that follow is considered a bonus.

 

[Manji Manii]

I don't quite know how to reply to this.
Thermite creates a really strong heat and as such probably will destroy the crucible.
Next the mix needs to be in mixed powder as a foil around an unknown amount of ground powder will fizz out really fast.
The active powder(Al/ZnO in this case)need to be well mixed and relatively pure, which means you do not want to dilute the thermite itself too much with inactive elements as the thermite reaction will stall as well.
So you will end up with massive uncontrollable volcano just to melt a little motherboard dust.
So it will be like spending Dollars to receive minute amounts of cents.

There are already established and effective methods to refine boards as Kurt described further up.
And boards do not contain much more than Copper and tiny amounts of Gold and Silver.
So this is used to recover the Copper and any PMs that follow is considered a bonus.

Steel crucibles are made for high temperatures, actually, a special thermite crucible would be best, however, if you pour steel, you have crucibles that can take a mild thermite reaction.

Next, the aluminum zinc oxide thermite evaporates the pure zinc metal, so if you put a bunch of mixed metals into the mix, you will end up with a simple alloy at the bottom.

$10 in zinc oxide is two pounds, two pounds of aluminum is about $7 and mixing 2 pounds of depopulated waste will leave you with 2 pounds of the mix metal most likely containing at least 1 pound of gold, silver and palladium in alloy. Separating your components reduces the amount of unwanted metals, a fire assay of this alloy would show that pound to have a value of about $1800. Two pounds of sorted material is about 200 standard mother boards

Next, this thermite reaction is so mild it can be done indoors, though I don't recommend it. It would not exactly be a volcano.

Yeah, I read the labor intensive process and the cost to power his furnace to extract the PMs would cost about $100 in fuel to process the same 2 pounds. This process would just be light it and forget it till it cools down.

I regularly use the Al+ZnO2 method to melt my platinum and burn off impurities. Been thinking about trying it with my iridium, but that might need titanium oxide, $100 a pound, to melt iridium.

Overall, my thermite process would produce the same results as using a furnace at about a quarter of the cost.

 

[Yggdrasil]

Steel crucibles are made for high temperatures, actually, a special thermite crucible would be best, however, if you pour steel, you have crucibles that can take a mild thermite reaction.

Next, the aluminum zinc oxide thermite evaporates the pure zinc metal, so if you put a bunch of mixed metals into the mix, you will end up with a simple alloy at the bottom.

$10 in zinc oxide is two pounds, two pounds of aluminum is about $7 and mixing 2 pounds of depopulated waste will leave you with 2 pounds of the mix metal most likely containing at least 1 pound of gold, silver and palladium in alloy. Separating your components reduces the amount of unwanted metals, a fire assay of this alloy would show that pound to have a value of about $1800. Two pounds of sorted material is about 200 standard mother boards

Next, this thermite reaction is so mild it can be done indoors, though I don't recommend it. It would not exactly be a volcano.

Yeah, I read the labor intensive process and the cost to power his furnace to extract the PMs would cost about $100 in fuel to process the same 2 pounds. This process would just be light it and forget it till it cools down.

I regularly use the Al+ZnO2 method to melt my platinum and burn off impurities. Been thinking about trying it with my iridium, but that might need titanium oxide, $100 a pound, to melt iridium.

Overall, my thermite process would produce the same results as using a furnace at about a quarter of the cost.

Steel crucibles can't even take ordinary gas furnace temperatures if I'm not mistaken.
And I would never subject any of my refined metals to such a procedure as it would not be pure anymore.
Pt are usually melted either in an induction furnace or Hydrogen/Oxygen torch.

Can this be used for many kilos of material at the time??

Better stick to what has been proven for years if you hope to make money.
For most that means selling on your stuff to the larger processors.

 

[goldshark]

Thermite is technically Al + FeO only. Also FeO can be found in most soils by simply dragging a magnet on the ground. Stream beds will have the highest percentage of it. I would not induce this reaction indoors, or in a steel crucible. High temperature refractories only. Watch Cody'slab on Youtube, for a demonstration of what is involved.

 

[Alondro]

Thermite is technically Al + FeO only. Also FeO can be found in most soils by simply dragging a magnet on the ground. Stream beds will have the highest percentage of it. I would not induce this reaction indoors, or in a steel crucible. High temperature refractories only. Watch Cody'slab on Youtube, for a demonstration of what is involved.

Thermite can be made from almost any combination of a less reactive metal in oxide dust form and a more reactive metal in metallic dust form.

There are some practically explosive combinations, in fact. Gold oxide and copper dust, for instance.

 

[goldshark]

Thermite can be made from almost any combination of a less reactive metal in oxide dust form and a more reactive metal in metallic dust form.

There are some practically explosive combinations, in fact. Gold oxide and copper dust, for instance.

Just trying to reiterate the chemical composition of Thermite. All others are an exothermal reactions, similar to Thermite. Like calling a tissue a Kleenex, even though it is not the same formula as Kleenex, therefore, it is not a Kleenex. Thermite is a known specific chemical combination. Just like calling AP as AR, because they both dissolve Au, doesn't make AP AR.

 

[Yggdrasil]

Anyway I do not consider any of the exothermic metal/oxide reactions suitable for our purpose.
It is not controllable and way to expensive for the purpose of this thread.

 

[Sancho_n_Pedro]

I was put off when I read "smokey". Not going to go down well doing this with my neighbours.

Thanks for the ideas, I can take this and explore further. Not going to just Burn stuff, but the grinding part made sense.

 

[g_axelsson]

If it is a smartphone, the mainboard PCB will be a gold and silver alloy, not copper, shred tablet, phone and small electronics boards and mix them in with the thermite and burn off the cellulose in the process, but this will make the mix burn hot and smokey.

I don't know where you read that, but it is definitely not true!
Why would manufacturers do something like that and even... HOW? Etching wires out of a gold silver alloy would be extremely hard. We usually have to inquart with silver to even be able to process such alloys.

Smartphones, just as 99.99% of all electronics, uses copper in the pcb. The only way to make circuit board with a gold-silver alloy is to screen print it. When found it is on a ceramic substrate that has been baked in an oven.

Göran

 

[kurtak]

4. Weigh the material and take equal amounts of zinc oxide and aluminum dust and mix it together. (Alternately, you can take the weight in aluminum foil plus the same in zinc oxide powder plus the grind and roll the foil with a strip of magnesium diagonally along the inside of the roll with the powder in the center, aluminum is flammable as foil.)
5. With a strip of magnesium ribbon as a fuse, put the mixture in a crucible and ignite the mixture using the magnesium fuse. Or light the fuse on the roll inside of a crucible, like you would use for iron smelting, not a little one ounce thing.

Though is may be a fun "small scale" experiment (as well as "somewhat" dangerous) it most certainly is NOT going to work on any production (for profit) scale !!!!!!!!!!!

$10 in zinc oxide is two pounds, two pounds of aluminum is about $7 and mixing 2 pounds of depopulated waste will leave you with 2 pounds of the mix metal most likely containing at least 1 pound of gold, silver and palladium in alloy. Separating your components reduces the amount of unwanted metals, a fire assay of this alloy would show that pound to have a value of about $1800.

This pure & utter nonsense - if not outright B.S

In the first place - 2 pounds of "depopulated waste" (scrap) will NEVER give you 2 pounds of dore (mixed) metal

That is because the VAST majority of "depopulated" waste is not metal - it is organics (like epoxies & other plastics etc.) & inorganics (such as silicon, silica, ceramics etc.)

In the second place - even if you got rid of ALL the organics & inorganics & used "your" process on nothing but the (2 pounds) metals from "depopulated waste" the PMs in that dore metal would NOT be even close to 1 pound of PMs - so NOT even close to $1,800 --- at best you will get a few grams (3 - 6 grams or if you are LUCKY maybe 7 - 8 grams PMS)

Two pounds of sorted material is about 200 standard mother boards

That is especially true if you are basing your process on 2 pounds of sorted material depopulated from 200 mother boards

And that is because you need about one ton (2,000 pounds) of "modern day" mother boards to get "about" 1 & a1/3 pounds of PMs (gold, silver & palladium)

From one ton of modern day mother boards you will get "about" ------

gold - 3.5 ozt = 108 gram

silver - 16 ozt = 497 grams

paladium - (plus/minus) 1 ozt = (plus/minus) 31 grams

total PMs = 636 grams minus 454 grams (a pound) = 182 grams = a bit more then 1 &1/3 pounds PMs from 1 ton mother boards

A modern day mother board weight is "about" 1 pound = (about) 2,000 mother boards per ton

Therefore 200 mother boards will only give you one tenth of what 1 ton will give you --- or only about 63.6 grams ("about" 2 ozt) of PMs (that is all PMs combined - mostly silver - some gold - very little palladium)

Yeah, I read the labor intensive process and the cost to power his furnace to extract the PMs would cost about $100 in fuel to process the same 2 pounds.

This also is pure & utter nonsense - if not outright B.S

You have clearly done very little - if any at all - actual smelting with a gas (propane) fired furnace

I have done a LOT of smelting over the course of about 10 years & depending on the smelt I can recover between 60 - 80 pounds dore metal with $100 propane

To put that in perspective - here is a picture of one day smelting --- 20 pounds dore metal recovered - used less then (2) 5 gallon tanks of propane (that is less then $25 at todays propane price) & that included not only the propane to run the furnace but also the propane to run the turkey frier to heat the cone mold

Besides a pic of recovered dore metal from one days smelting I am including a pic of my smelting set up

Bottom line here Minji Manii - & I don't mean to be rude here - but not all of us here are "hobby" refiners &/or you tube "hacks" --- some of us have been doing this for a long time & doing it as "for profit" living

So you can expect that those of us with years of experience - making a living (for profit) will correct such utter nonsense &/or B.S - as you have posted here - & that holds true whether it is you posting it or someone else

With that said - welcome to the forum - you have just joined the worlds very best place to learn about the recovery & refining of PMs - we in fact have some of the worlds very finest refiners here on this form - some of them are just hobby refiners with MANY years experience - others of us have years of experience owning & or running small to VERY LARGE commercial (for profit) refineries - & we come from all around the world

So we hope you will stick around for the discussions & learning

Kurt

 

[kurtak]

I was put off when I read "smokey". Not going to go down well doing this with my neighbours.

There are ways to do this that reduces the smoke BY A LOT

Kurt

 

[anarxi]

I have long wanted to ask you why the dore bar has this shape, and where is the top?