E-Waste Mining Could Be Big Business (bbc.com) 112
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Professor Veena Sahajwalla's mine in Australia produces gold, silver and copper -- and there isn't a pick-axe in sight. Her "urban mine" at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) is extracting these materials not from rock, but from electronic gadgets. The Sydney-based expert in materials science reckons her operation will become efficient enough to be making a profit within a couple of years. "Economic modeling shows the cost of around $500,000 Australian dollars for a micro-factory pays off in two to three years, and can generate revenue and create jobs," she says. "That means there are environmental, social and economic benefits." In fact, research indicates that such facilities can actually be far more profitable than traditional mining.
According to a study published recently in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, a typical cathode-ray tube TV contains about 450g of copper and 227g of aluminum, as well as around 5.6g of gold. While a gold mine can generate five or six grammes of the metal per tonne of raw material, that figure rises to as much as 350g per tonne when the source is discarded electronics. The figures emerged in a joint study from Beijing's Tsinghua University and Macquarie University, in Sydney, where academics examined data from eight recycling companies in China to work out the cost for extracting these metals from electronic waste.
According to a study published recently in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, a typical cathode-ray tube TV contains about 450g of copper and 227g of aluminum, as well as around 5.6g of gold. While a gold mine can generate five or six grammes of the metal per tonne of raw material, that figure rises to as much as 350g per tonne when the source is discarded electronics. The figures emerged in a joint study from Beijing's Tsinghua University and Macquarie University, in Sydney, where academics examined data from eight recycling companies in China to work out the cost for extracting these metals from electronic waste.
Gold mines don't deal with horrible byproducts (Score:2, Interesting)
CRTs tend to contain some really nasty stuff, including lead, barium, and various kinds of phosphor coating.
Since the recycling industry is vastly a "you break it, you deal with it" kind of deal, those chemicals need to be reclaimed somehow and disposed of. That process will eat into your potential profits like crazy. Of course, the article mentions China so I doubt they're doing anything of the sort (and just dumping that shit into the environment), which is probably one of the reasons why they're able to
Re: Gold mines don't deal with horrible byproducts (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, gold mines have horrendous byproducts due to the post processing of mined material. That says nothing about the effects of dredging streams, honeycombing mountains for veins, etc.
Re:Gold mines don't deal with horrible byproducts (Score:5, Informative)
What? Fucktons of horrible byproducts get generated depending upon the method of extraction and refining of gold. Ever hear of mercury amalgamation or cyanide leaching? Nitric acid processing? Do you even mine and extract gold? I do, but only as a by-product of hunting down gemstone material. If it's not in native form and large enough to bother with without the need for chemical (excepting dihydrogen monoxide) or fire to extract, I'm on it, but otherwise some other fool can have fun with the tailings and poisoning the environment.
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Naturally you are using low-tech high polluting old methods of processing being a hobbyist. And millions of small scale miners in the Third World do the same. And of course the products of bad mining practices of a century ago are not going away, and will continue to require management.
But pollution is not a necessary result of properly regulated industrial scale modern operations.
In its final days of operation (the mine closed in 2000) the main problem with the water discharge from the Homestake Mine (seco
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"Naturally you are using low-tech high polluting old methods of processing being a hobbyist."
No, in fact every bit of what I mentioned is standard practice in industry TODAY. Your bioleaching is dog-slow and can't compete with even the most basic roasting/smelting process for production volume.
Try again when you actually work the industry.
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You forgot to link to your hosts file.
You also forgot to link to a site that shows how traditional gold mining is a boon for the environment.
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"P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME"
Since you've proven that said name is what you say it is, then your pedophilia claim can stick as well, yes, Alexander Peter Kowalski, of Syracuse, New York?
As in you've got the actual proof to back up the claim you're putting forth, or your proxies are putting forth?
Prove otherwise that you aren't related this current crime which is in progress , since you think you know Federal Law.
PROVE IT, SOYBOY. PROVE A CRIME COMMITTED AGAINST YOU.
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"UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME"
Considering everyone on this site knows my actual name by now, your claim is a really falsifiable one.
But you're not very smart, and you can have your ass beaten by me at any time.
Son, I have a controlling interest in your ISP. As in I have HUGE Charter stock.
Try again when you can beat me in actual expenditures. Or let alone the fact that I know your ISP and can have your info at any time I choose due to my controlling stock interest.
Wanna piss me off, soyboy? Your mother's alread
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You're replying to a literal slashdot retard, so don't bother asking.
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CRTs tend to contain some really nasty stuff, including lead, barium, and various kinds of phosphor coating.
Since the recycling industry is vastly a "you break it, you deal with it" kind of deal, those chemicals need to be reclaimed somehow and disposed of. That process will eat into your potential profits like crazy.
The problem with recycling stuff . . . if that we are trying to recycle stuff that wasn't built to be recycled. The stuff was built to be used, and tossed away. Recycling is an afterthought, so of course it is difficult.
Now, if we built stuff to be recycled . . . it would be easier and cheaper . . . but it would probably make the stuff . . . (gasp!) . . . more expensive. No one wants that! And things would probably be bigger . . . instead of smaller and thinner like everyone wants.
So, I'm guessing tha
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As far as mining goes, about a third of the world's copper is
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If recyclers don't take CRTs then they either end up in the regular trash or somewhere in the closest forest. Neither is a good option.
Actually, the dumping grounds of today are the resource mines of the future.
The one thing that will be cursed and regretted in the future are the high-temperature incinerators that obliterate the resources that people in the future will seek out in the landfills/resource-zones of the future.
Yeah, how about no (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, how about no (Score:5, Interesting)
Most electronics recycling companies are junking the plastics, and only recycling what's on the boards or other components, then junking the boards and component remnants as well.
They're not giving a shit about the plastics, since that's not what they're after. They want that gold, copper, silver, aluminum, iridium, platinum, and such.
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I know people that were doing this in Australia over 20 years ago, though they tended to focus more on old mainframe components due to the high amounts of gold they could yield from them
Yep. In the early 1990's they had a Government auction here where a Univac was up for bid.
High bid was $300 (US), and pulled from the auction as the precious metals that could be salvaged was much more than that.
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High bid was $300 (US), and pulled from the auction as the precious metals that could be salvaged was much more than that.
WTF? Why was the auction 'pulled'? If the value was higher, somebody would have bid on it accordingly. It doesn't sound like it was an auction, it sounds like a swindle operation. Who benefited from the 'salvage value' and why weren't they told to just bid on the scrap?
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High bid was $300 (US), and pulled from the auction as the precious metals that could be salvaged was much more than that.
WTF? Why was the auction 'pulled'? If the value was higher, somebody would have bid on it accordingly. It doesn't sound like it was an auction, it sounds like a swindle operation. Who benefited from the 'salvage value' and why weren't they told to just bid on the scrap?
Can't answer that.
I saw it was for bid, and interested, I bid on a pallet of teletypes.
Weeks later while loading the teletypes I asked about the Univac and was told of the bid results.
In the US we've pretty much stopped making steel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In the US we've pretty much stopped making stee (Score:5, Interesting)
Canada and the UK did the same with recycling old paper. Paper mills went out of business due to lack of demand and even the price of waste paper fell because there was so much of it.
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because recycling the old steel is more profitable
And because it's cheaper to import.
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And also, we haven't "pretty much quit making steel" in the US.
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The US is the world's top steel importer. The value of steel shipped into the US was just over $29 billion in 2017.
It's clearly not because you don't need steel [cnn.com] anymore either.
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Here's a 1920s era plant that's reopening thanks to Trump. They were going to open a new plant in India -
https://www.nbc4i.com/news/pol... [nbc4i.com]
The left almost ruined out steel industry.
It's mostly from recycling (Score:2)
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Detroit has it's own problems with the residents. Any abandoned house becomes a crackhouse. The druggies then raid other homes, street lights and traffic lights for copper to resell for drug money. Anyone who tries to renovate property to make a profit is like to find themselves having squatters with the full support of the police and city.
It then becomes more cost-effective to demolish abandoned properties, especially if they have water damage and mold.
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"Detroit has it's own problems"
Like extra apostrophes?
Re: It's mostly from recycling (Score:4, Informative)
We stopped building in places no one wants to live in the 70s. The construction cranes littering the skyline in other areas clearly demonstrate building is still happening at a decent clip.
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Re:In the US we've pretty much stopped making stee (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. The US is the third largest producer of raw steel in the world, 88 million tons last year.
Aside from the U.S. being in 2017 the fourth largest producer of raw steel, not third, behind China, Japan, and India, you should be made aware of the fact that, exactly as rsivergun said, the U.S. produced only 22 million tons of pig iron in 2017, the remainder of the 82 million tons of raw steel produced (73%) was remelted scrap. So about three quarters of U.S. steel is from scrap, not from iron ore.
And the U.S. produces only 4.8% of the world's steel, and only 1.7% of the its pig iron! China makes more than ten times as much steel, and thirty two times as much pig iron, as the U.S. So in terms of the world market - the U.S. really doesn't produce steel anymore. The U.S. high point in producing steel from ore (rather than just remelting existing steel) was 1973 when it produced 92 million tons, more than four times as much.
See this World Steel Association document [worldsteel.org]. Also the USGS spreadsheets are excellent [usgs.gov].
Re: Fun to watch foreigners using American units (Score:2)
What is significant about 50 lbs?
It's significant in two ways:
1. Based on medical research 50 lbs has pretty much been established as the maximum amount of weight an average worker should be expected to repeatedly lift.
2. Aircraft are heavily affected by weight distribution, and need to be loaded in a way that doesn't significantly change the centre of gravity. Stabdardizing passenger luggage makes the math easier when figuring out how to load it.
Since a consistent weight for luggage is helpful, it made sense to standardise the limit ba
Re: Fun to watch foreigners using American unit (Score:2)
No research is done by scientists. Scientists use metric.
Not sure if retarded or trolling ....
Re: Fun to watch foreigners using American unit (Score:2)
Ah. So ... retarded then.
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Based on medical research 50 lbs ...
No! Research is done by scientists. Scientists use metric. It was just rounded off to make it easy for kids like you to understand it.
I vote for troll.
Re: Fun to watch foreigners using American units (Score:2)
Foreigners use customary units too, they just convert them for public consumption. Once you know this, you start seeing it all the time. For example, European airlines always have a 23-kg (50-pound) bag weight limit. Why 23? Because it's 50 pounds.
Those types of examples are due to standards which were put in place by the US. If "foreigners" had set the standard limit it would probably be 20 kilograms, and the US would be telling it's passengers they're limited to 44 lbs.
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Numbers correct? (Score:2)
Doesn't seem wrong to me (Score:2)
5.6 grammes won't go far given how heavy gold is. Even the basic old TVs and VGA monitors had chips in them to deal with all the timing, not to mention OSD, and even the analogue amplifiers were in chips. The power supplies have a chip or two to manage all the switch-mode functions.
I assume individual packaged transistors/diodes use copper or silver jumper wires because they can have large bonding pads on the silicon, but it is possible gold is required there too.
LCD/Plasma/OLED will have even more gold s
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"5.6 grammes won't go far given how heavy gold is"
You can pound gold so thin that you have to cut it with bamboo because it will stick to a metal blade. A pound of gold pounded out to foil will cover en entire football field. How many circuit boards you think that'll cover?
"LCD/Plasma/OLED will have even more gold simply because of the huge mass of pins driving the display array"
No, in fact most of those edge pins on the glass are tin, and you attach driving boards to them with a special non-conductive glue
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Gees, give me a break. It's not the legs themselves but the chips needed to manage/drive all those legs. The bonded chip pins have gold jumper wires from the package to the silicon.
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Not the GP, but having bonded chips before. Gold wire is 0.5thou thick and not used universally. The vast majority of chips actually use tin. You'll find gold usually in RF or other highspeed circuits.
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Well, I can't see gold having another purpose in the old CRTs. Maybe gold was just the safe bet in the past so ended up in all chips back then.
Modern digital processors are no slouch on the freq front. And modern TVs have their fair shear of digital processing in them.
Tin sounds like a crap material for this use. The shear density of I/O, in excess of 1000 pins for some, means tin on the bond points must be a nightmare preventing it whiskering or diffusing in weird ways. Copper seems a decent fit for a
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"LCD, plasma and OLED will additionally have gold plated connectors for the high speed data cabling."
Maybe on the ZIF sockets, but the cables themselves are usually graphite coated or tin plated.
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I did say "connectors". I'm not sure how that could be interpreted as wires in a cable.
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Because connectors also includes the ends of the cable, which are properly called terminated connections.
Try actually working the industry instead of being a fake-ass n00b.
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Modern digital processors are no slouch on the freq front.
Indeed they are not and I guarantee you'll find gold somewhere in every bit of electronics, but the overwhelming vast majority of little black squares you see on a circuit board are not some high frequency, actually you may find plenty of them aren't even modern as there are some designs from the 70s that have well and truly withstood the test of time.
Tin sounds like a crap material for this use.
Indeed it is. Remember this post next time some electronics of yours fail for inexplicable reasons. *sigh*
LCD, plasma and OLED will additionally have gold plated connectors for the high speed data cabling.
which part are you considering high-speed? Gold plat
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You were the one talking about speed being relevant. I had classed all chips and connectors equally originally.
There is a ton of connections along at least two edges of the flat panel display to form the array drivers. All of that needs quite a few high speed chips.
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5.6 grammes won't go far given how heavy gold is.
5.6 grams of goal is a huge amount given that typical gold in electronics is electroplated to below 1 micrometer thickness. Go check out some youtube videos on people recovering gold from circuit boards. There was a good one from cutting of the PCB fingers from slide in cards since they are almost 100% covered with gold plating. 0.5kg of the fingers (enough to make up something the size of a motherboard completely gold plated on both sides) will net you return of under 1g of gold (a ball the size of a pinhe
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No, this is obviously the evil handiwork of Big Math.
Strat
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Re: Numbers correct? (Score:3)
Are these numbers right? 5.6g gold per TV sounds too high. That is about 1/5oz, which would be worth about 250$.
Back in 1990 when that TV was likely made those 5.6 ounces would only have been worth about $70. Given that a decent size set cost $600+ it's not that outlandish to think the gold in it made up ~10% of the total cost.
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Re: Numbers correct? (Score:2)
Correct, but the numbers are accurate if you swap the unit.
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Correct, but the numbers are accurate if you swap the unit.
The price of the gold in a TV would be different.
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Correct, but the numbers are accurate if you swap the unit.
But yes, you look to have used grams in the calculation of cost.
Re: Numbers correct? (Score:3)
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Yes, it is that outlandish to think that one small aspect of a TV could make up 10% of it's *retail* cost. That would probably be well over half the cost of all the raw materials in the set.
TVs have been a cutthroat business since at least the 1970s. Anything that expensive would have been cost reduced out a long time ago.
Re: Numbers correct? (Score:2)
That's assuming it COULD be reduced. The biggest expense for airliners is fuel, accounting for 20-30% of all expenditures. Yet, while some advances continue to be made, the overall percentage is never going to be half of that or less.
I'm not saying that there really IS that much gold in these sets. I have only the vaguest idea about how CRTs were built so I'm certainly not an expert on the subject. I'm just pointing out that it's not as implausible as the OP implied. I would love to hear from someone w
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I can't think why there would be ANY gold in consumer electronics these days. Gold was widely used in electronics connectors prior to the 1970s because it's a very good conductor, and it doesn't oxidize. But when Gold prices soared from $32 an Oz(28g) to (briefly) $800/Ounce (28g) and settled around $400 /Oz, Gold was eliminated where possible and was reduced to VERY thin coatings elsewhere. But it turned out that very thin coatings aren't very compatible with gas-tight connector technology (the GT socke
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Someone that can't be ass'd to try, would be the weak minded one.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm surprised they even mentioned CRTs. I used to salvage gold from computer circuit boards. Enough to put me through college and then some. Sometimes it seemed like slave labour. After watching Gold Rush, I don't think I had it so bad.
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The last mass-produced CRT's probably were about 10 years ago. Price of gold 10 years ago is in the same ballpark as it is today.
There's no way there's 5.6 grams of gold in a typical old CRT. If there was, you'd see zero old TVs and computer monitors by the side of the road or sitting next to dumpsters.
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It is actually a gold rush if you only process certain things. If you specialize specifically in computer products, that's a lot of gold and platinum (hard drive platter coatings) to recover.
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Who can be expected to do a task again and again with the skills to get past plastic and any RF exposure compliance to the parts that make a profit? For free.
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"So only the very best parts get metals extracted from them."
Fuck no, at the high concentration they're already at in the components themselves, just smelt the damned things, fuck sorting. At the concentrations present, you just smelt in an induction centrifuge and let specific gravity sort the shit out naturally. Basic freaking physics.
Don't need a large team for that. There's a 50Ksqft recycling warehouse here in SoCal only operates with about 5 people.
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Part of the value of asteroid mining is that the resources being mined are past the gravity well and available to use to build large scale infrastructure out in space.
If we can mostly life intelligence and process information and use the resources 'out there' in space to build the infrastructure, it eventually becomes more viable to do things out in space.
Re: Funny reading the answers here (Score:2)
I don't think anyone is suggesting mining asteroids for common metals like gold. It's rare Earth metals (emphasis on the "rare" and the "Earth") we're after.
Nasty shit (Score:2)
Hardly (Score:2)
Perhaps with the current EPA leaders it could be done, they don't care if people around the factory lose their teeth and hair and livers, but if you do it so that the environment isn't poisoned, it can't be done at a profit.
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So do you have any actual proof about the EPA not caring or is your opinion all based on what the main stream media has told you to believe?
Just curios.
our university Unidragmet doing so from 2003 (Score:1)
Nothing new.
Belarus mostly fills National Bank gold reserve from electronic waste.
http://unidragmet.by/o-nas
Then they need to go to Thailand (Score:1)
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e-waste has been a valuable resource for years.
https://www.jacomij.com/en/ [jacomij.com]
https://www.kh-metals.nl/en/el... [kh-metals.nl]