Anyone recover precious metals from electronics and electrical components?

[BenStark]

I am curious if anyone here recovers precious metals from electronics and/or electrical components. I have a few dead pumps, fans, some dead/useless electronics, and bundles of old cables. Probably not enough to be worth buying all the components to do it myself, but enough to ponder the idea.

 

[jeep78]

If you go at it to.make money, you will have a lot of trash to deal with. Rolloff loads every few weeks.

A neighbor did it for a while until the county shut him down for lack of permits.

Breaking stuff down to recover copper and aluminum is not bad, but not much money in it. More money walking the roads and picking up cans.

Gold is where the money is, but chemicals and hazmat is involved, as well as some lab equipment.

 

[BenStark]

I had pretty much the same thoughts. If you're not getting into gold and silver you're going to be hard pressed to break even just on the cost of the heating fuel. Copper is about $2.50 a pound for spot and a 15-lbs propane cylinder exchange is about $20. So if you're not getting at least 8lbs out of a propane tank you're not breaking even. And that doesn't include the cost of the materials.

 

[mountainmoped]

I spent 16 years working in a metallurgical lab. We recovered gold from electric and electronic scrap as will as gold plated eyeglass frames. We used aqua regia as well as sodium cyanide processes. Both relatively simple processes but both processes involved dangerous chemicals. We also recovered silver from old X-ray film. These were "government projects" done on company time with company equipment when we should have been doing research on mineral processing methods. We also did some recovery of mercury from some abandoned instrumentation. The proceeds from the sale of the recovered materials funded our department parties and our racing hobby.

Cyanide processing requires much equipment to do safely. Aqua regia processing is relatively safe, but does require the use of nitric and hydrochloric acids to dissolve the gold. After the gold is dissolved in the acid solution a piece of zinc is dropped into the solution. The zinc is a much more active metal than the gold so it instantly replaces the gold in the solution. The gold is then precipitated out and falls to the bottom of the container.

 

[spencer60]

It's not even worth it with today's electronics. Back when I was a tech in the 80s we routinely sent all our scrap to be processed and recovered. But circuit boards today have so little precious metal in them it's amazing they even function.

 

[BenStark]

I spent 16 years working in a metallurgical lab. We recovered gold from electric and electronic scrap as will as gold plated eyeglass frames. We used aqua regia as well as sodium cyanide processes. Both relatively simple processes but both processes involved dangerous chemicals. We also recovered silver from old X-ray film. These were "government projects" done on company time with company equipment when we should have been doing research on mineral processing methods. We also did some recovery of mercury from some abandoned instrumentation. The proceeds from the sale of the recovered materials funded our department parties and our racing hobby.

Cyanide processing requires much equipment to do safely. Aqua regia processing is relatively safe, but does require the use of nitric and hydrochloric acids to dissolve the gold. After the gold is dissolved in the acid solution a piece of zinc is dropped into the solution. The zinc is a much more active metal than the gold so it instantly replaces the gold in the solution. The gold is then precipitated out and falls to the bottom of the container.

Okay, that is interesting as hell. Definitely cool info, but definitely not something I am going to take on.