Silver contact wastes minerals.

[adam mizer]

I have been running these silver contacts from 330 amp blown industrial contactors (Less than 10 years old).
Looking for make up on the contacts I run across silver and tin but I'm not totally convinced.
These contactors appear to be made in south Korea.
Also looks like I'm getting approximately 80% silver.

Now I was working on the waste a little.
Used zinc to drop metals.
Came up with a light gray color sludge and then filtered.
After filtered it was a white sludge.
Then after some days checked filter and top is dark color little blue/green on edges and still drying its a touch of off white under the top layer.

Anybody maybe might know if this appears like tin?
Some of the other minerals are actually from other silver contact wastes (the blue\green stuff).
I mixed the waste in a bucket.

Maybe I should try melt into metal.

 

[adam mizer]

This is my other bucket of waste from silver contacts. Silver contacts much older I believe from a variety of devices.
So to make this more understandable.
I stored silver waste according to color.
The post above was green color waste bucket. This post is blue color waste bucket.

Both of these posts were dropped from solution using zinc.
This drop from solution and the other I did some looking around for images that appear like what I am looking at.
Here are pictures and my guestimation of metals dropped from solution.

At first I was thinking copper because of the color.
Now I'm thinking also cadmium.
From my gold solutions and AP the copper bubbles and batches up while the zinc reacts into solution.
This solution the zinc went in and there was no metal reaction on top.
However there was a NOX reaction (wasted some nitric acid).

I'm not sure but making guesses that this has quite a bit of the bad metal Cadmium and what appears like nickel maybe.
EDIT ADD: or possibly this is Iron, has same colors.
Will take care bagging up and disposal. Lucky I have free drop-off services in my area.

EDIT: add picture, stuff in beaker now in filter paper. Unknown. Going to disposal.

 

[adam mizer]

Just for fun I tried melting some of the metal drop from what I thought was tin. First pictures first post.
This appeared to start melting to a dark colored liquid and a lot of colored smoke and I did not get a pool of metallic liquid.

Had a good breeze here and discontinued, it seems too dangerous. Too much smoke and appears unsafe/unhealthy.
The stuff melted easily but I could not pool the liquid.
Do not know what this is and don't think I'm going to know.
The stuff in the picture. Unknown.
Going to disposal.

 

[anachronism]

Just for fun I tried melting some of the metal drop from what I thought was tin. First pictures first post.
This appeared to start melting to a dark colored liquid and a lot of colored smoke and I did not get a pool of metallic liquid.

Had a good breeze here and discontinued, it seems too dangerous. Too much smoke and appears unsafe/unhealthy.
The stuff melted easily but I could not pool the liquid.
Do not know what this is and don't think I'm going to know.
The stuff in the picture. Unknown.
Going to disposal.

Adam are you 100% sure there's no Cadmium in these before you melt them? It's not particularly forgiving.

 

[adam mizer]

No I'm not sure. Yes I believe there can be cadmium presence.
I am not going to continue this experiment for safety reasons.

However I'm very interested in wastes and what they look like when dropped out of solutions.

 

[adam mizer]

To anyone reading this post of wastes.
These silver contacts in general seem to contain several various minerals. I can't nail it down. Not enough information.
They can be highly poisonous to your health.

It is most advisable to let this waste go.