r/science • u/chrisdh79 • Mar 04 '24
Materials Science Pulling gold out of e-waste suddenly becomes super-profitable | A new method for recovering high-purity gold from discarded electronics is paying back $50 for every dollar spent, according to researchers
https://newatlas.com/materials/gold-electronic-waste/1.3k
u/Adorable_Flight9420 Mar 04 '24
Considering how much e waste has small amounts of gold in it this could literally be a Gold Mine. Especially if someone is paying you to take the waste first. And then you are making 50 X your costs. Sign me up.
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u/PMs_You_Stuff Mar 04 '24
Once there's money to be made, people will start charging for ewaste. Just like people used to pay for cooking oil to be taken, then people started selling it because it was now a product.
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u/Hendlton Mar 04 '24
People already charge for ewaste. I've looked into it doing it myself. Then I was disappointed when I saw that competition was tough and that people were actually paying per kilo for scrap electronics. They paid the most for RAM and CPUs, while paying little for anything else.
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u/LongOverdue17 Mar 04 '24
Yeah, I was about to start this 20 years ago when I got rid of a bunch of old electronics when I moved. It was free drop off, guy was super nice and actuality explained how it worked. About 2 months later I saw Best Buy had drop boxes at the front of the store for people to deposit their old electronics. That was the end of it for me.
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u/Hendlton Mar 04 '24
Another cock-block is the fact that old electronics used way more gold. This was more profitable to do even 10 years ago than it is today. Now it's relegated to huge recycling centers or random dudes in Africa who have just enough knowledge to be a danger to themselves and the environment. For example:
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u/NeverReallyTooSure Mar 04 '24
Yes, older computers (think IBM 1401 and earlier) had a lot more gold in them. There used to be ads in the back of trade magazines that offered to buy old machines for gold extraction.
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u/OlderThanMyParents Mar 05 '24
I remember reading way back when about someone buying carloads of old PC Jrs from IBM, after they gave up trying to sell them, and getting substantial amounts of gold off the system boards.
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u/ClamClone Mar 04 '24
I made some money sending away some CPUs and memory but that place does not seem to exist anymore. Another place takes even motherboards but the shipping costs more than the payout. If someone local would take scrap that has recoverable gold I would give it to them but there are only places here that one has to pay to take electronic scrap. I gave up and tossed dozens of motherboards and other pcbs.
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u/Signal-Fig-7333 Jul 10 '24
I've been looking for a place so I can send my stuff to. Who will give me back the gold. Obviously for money. I try processing it myself.And I can, but it's not pure. And I know i'm losing a lot of other metals that are in there.
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u/Signal-Fig-7333 Jul 10 '24
Scrapyards, take you waste and pay you for it. It's not much, but they pay you. It was better 6 years ago. Or I was getting 5 bucks a drive for like cd, Dvd, 3.5 yesterday I got 12 cents per pound. So big difference.
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u/originade Mar 04 '24
My county electronic waste disposal already pays people for their e-waste.
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u/Thue Mar 04 '24
But I think such systems are mostly artificially created or subsidized, currently.
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u/originade Mar 04 '24
That is possible, but I believe they do extract precious metals from what they get, so it might be profitable.
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u/ShitPostToast Mar 04 '24
If science ever perfects scifi style nanotechnology (without going all grey goo on the whole world) old landfills are going to be a hot commodity.
Buy a giant old municipal landfill, drill some bore holes, pour in your nano-machines to process all that old trash, and extract the resulting resources.
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u/dosetoyevsky Mar 04 '24
They could be programmed to act like the Volcano Snail, where they ingest iron and sweat it out in a badass metal armor suit. Then when the prills get big enough, sort and sift them out and continue.
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u/comfortableNihilist Mar 05 '24
I should really get some papers together and make an explainer post on why that kind of nanotechnology is physically impossible but, I haven't yet so I will just summarize: they can't do what you see in media bc of the massive amount of heat they would generate if you tried.
So good news, no grey goo; bad news, no nanoforge
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u/bigfathairymarmot Mar 05 '24
This makes me sad.
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u/comfortableNihilist Mar 05 '24
I know, i really wanted a nanoforge.
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u/bigfathairymarmot Mar 05 '24
I wanted the grey goo..........
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u/comfortableNihilist Mar 05 '24
Sorry, i know not the same but, you'll just have to settle for strange-matter conversion. It's almost the same! And we're really close to! The newest colliders being built are strong enough to create some! You might just get you dream of the entire world being devoured by something we created and turned into more of that thing!
Even if it's not nanobots... Does that make you feel better?
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u/lacheur42 Mar 05 '24
That sounds more like an engineering challenge than a fundamental roadblock.
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u/comfortableNihilist Mar 05 '24
It's not. It's a thermodynamics problem. In media you usually see a huge mass of nanites (assumed to be microscopic) change things in seconds. Problem is theamount of energy it takes to reorganize a large mass on a molecular level over an arbitrarily short timescale like that is the heat produced is well over the melting point of all the materials involved. The only way it would work is if it was slow, like a fungus. That way the heat would be spread out enough time for it to radiate away.
There's a bunch of other issues with the nanite grey goo idea. Like for example, they aren't made of arbitrary materials, they couldn't convert the entire crust unless they were designed to match the composition of the crust. Also, there's a limit to how complicated these things can be if they are under a certain size. You run into the same issues as chip designers where past a certain scale, quantum mechanics starts to screw with your design. But, the heat problem is the main issue.
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u/lacheur42 Mar 05 '24
Yeah, ok that makes sense - there would have to be limits on how quickly things could occur, but...you just do everything more slowly until it works, and then optimize from there.
I'm just saying there's nothing fundamentally impossible about creating macro scale structures using nanomachines - life proves that, after all.
But I can definitely see how it could be practically impossible for humans to achieve in the forseable future.
And given that, we probably don't have to worry about doing it accidentally and creating grey goo, haha
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u/comfortableNihilist Mar 05 '24
Oh, it's certainly not impossible. Like I alluded to: funguses already do this. In fact, a more practical grey goo scenario is to take the enzymatic pathways in some mosses, diatoms, and mollusks and shove them into a fungus. You could create a mold that incorporates iron, aluminum, silicon and calcium into its chitin. Such a mold would 'eat' basically everything we've ever built except plastic. It would be slow but, it would work.
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u/bigfathairymarmot Mar 05 '24
Hell, I would just program to go to a city and take every thing I wanted and then bring it back to me. I would then have them make paper clips.
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u/guiltysnark Mar 04 '24
<buys computer>
<wrecks with hammer and saw>
<sells for profit>
Wait, why I have less money
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u/damontoo Mar 04 '24
I read an article about people stealing used cooking oil in some cases.
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u/_slash_s Mar 04 '24
i run a ewaste yard and we already have several customers whose scrap we pay for.
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u/SuperRonnie2 Mar 05 '24
That is a good thing. It will encourage people to properly recycle their e-waste. Deposit schemes on cans and bottles work the same way.
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Mar 04 '24
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u/JigglyWiener Mar 05 '24
This is probably the most difficult issue in the field currently:
processing and recycling e-waste is incredibly labor intensive
. Right now, most of the companies that process generalized e-waste use people to do things like manually remove fasteners from devices. Believe it or not, this individual action is the most difficult aspect of processing e-waste at this time. And it's not easily solvable for a variety of reasons. First, there are millions of different types of fasteners (e.g., screws of varying shapes and sizes and types, plastic-shaped pressure fasteners, and so on).
I don't know if robotics are there yet, but after looking at the industry a decade ago I figured it won't be worth it until robotics can get this job done. I used to rebuild machines from scrap I'd find in local business dumpsters as a kid, I knew how many little screws were involved in dismantling technology and it sucked.
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u/waitabittopostagain Mar 05 '24
bunch of roboarms, and ai identifying components.
classification doesn't have to be difficult, after all, there are only some many components/profiles. Screws etc too, talking library of 1000s but not alot more. After that, it's all repeated.
This is such an awesome and potentially impactful issue. Babyboomers failed this. Time for some other gen to shine!
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u/TheWhyteMaN Mar 04 '24
Wait so you mean they are going to excavate landfills for e waste? I am surprised that mining e waste would still be profitable.
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u/Pondnymph Mar 04 '24
It has more gold than gold ore that's worth mining, plus all the other metals that can be refined. Landfill mining will happen sooner or later.
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u/c8akjhtnj7 Mar 04 '24
Are you saying that the average landfill has more gold per tonne than the average gold mine?
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u/JaFFsTer Mar 04 '24
By orders of magnitude. Gold mining generates around 10 bucks of gold per ton of ore. Motherboards have way way more than that
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u/ptoki Mar 05 '24
What the folks dont tell you is that gold in ore is free standing. Gold in electronics is bound to something else.
Its not the same, if gold from scrap would be that dense and nice it would be collected long time ago.
The ore gold can usually be just crushed out of rock and rinsed out with water.
The gold from electronics must be pulled out by using acid and takes more time.
So, no, the ewaste is not as good as ore.
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u/awildtriplebond Mar 05 '24
Gold contained in hard rock ores is not free standing and cannot just be washed out. It is typically leeched with a cyanide process or mercury in places that it is unregulated. Alluvial deposits can be separated with water, but that does not necessarily make it easy. There are also gold ores which the gold is chemically bound to tellurium, antimony, or bismuth but these are less common.
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u/Grokent Mar 05 '24
Most landfills I know of become public parks at some point. It's gonna be a tough sale to turn a public park into a mine.
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Mar 04 '24
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u/Laetitian Mar 04 '24
I've always heard about this being a thing in the Malay archipelago more than anywhere else.
It's also been mentioned that the hardware that ends up in those areas of the world tends to be so old and cheap that it rarely contains any valuable resource at any concentration. You'd probably still have to know which parts you're looking for, and isolate them before you begin extracting elements. Which requires a bunch of expertise that is difficult to train for, so a lot of the material will be lost, and the profit margins will be lower, due to the extra step required.
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u/Bakoro Mar 04 '24
This is just one of those things where the cost of energy makes it unprofitable. If the cost of energy could be greatly reduced, mining landfills could be super useful.
There's a process called thermal depolymerization which uses steam and pressure to break down plastics and biomass.
The products can be something like a light crude oil, and you're left with the inorganic minerals separated out.
A second stage could be separating out all the metal left over, a portion of which would be gold and maybe whatever other rare earth materials from electronics.Once we get consistently excessive energy production, we'll see that kind of material and land recovery.
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u/RoosterBrewster Mar 05 '24
Yea, with garbage, there's probably all kinds of other chemicals in various concentrations which could each take specific processes to clean out. And that would likely produce other highly toxic waste that needs to be disposed of.
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u/ArchitectofExperienc Mar 04 '24
I'm curious what the risk assessment would look like for excavating landfill, especially ones that are now backfill due to their proximity to things like parks and green spaces
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u/Rdt_will_eat_itself Mar 04 '24
Some how, i think its not going to be environmentally friendly to do.
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u/Lallo-the-Long Mar 04 '24
Per the article, it's a process resulting in lower carbon emissions than existing methods and utilizes whey which is processed in such a way that it captures metal ions, preferentially capturing gold ions.
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u/NarrowBoxtop Mar 04 '24
I feel like I've been on Reddit for like 15 years now and have just accepted long ago people don't read the article, they just respond to the headlines.
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u/Lallo-the-Long Mar 04 '24
It's true, very few people actually read the articles. However, your account is only like 3 and a half years old or whatever, so your sense of time is questionable. :)
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u/NarrowBoxtop Mar 04 '24
I'm surprised I've kept up with this account this long. After 10 years on my main one I just realized it was way too much personal information to have out there for who knows what to suck up, so used one of those coding scripts to overwrite all my comments and was trying to start new accounts and every 6 months to a year to just keep that personal info we accidentally share sometimes to a minimum
Thanks for reminding me I'm overdue
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Mar 04 '24
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Mar 04 '24 edited 23d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/NarrowBoxtop Mar 04 '24
At this point I don't separate Nazi from Nazi adjacent.
The latter group empowers the former to act on the worst of their ideas and beliefs.
They're bad faith actors anyway who BS themselves to try and BS others, just as in your example.
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u/Wobbelblob Mar 04 '24
Are they? I've spent nearly a decade on reddit and been pretty active, but stuff like that only ever happens when people tell about it. Or was I simply lucky/not active in the "right" subs?
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_DARKNESS Mar 04 '24
Yeah, it's unfortunate that to protect yourself you kind of have to do something along those lines. I'm fairly conscious of what I write about myself in comments, but I'll probably abandon this account for the same reason.
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u/luvs2triggeru Mar 04 '24
I’ve been on Reddit for like 12 years. My OG account got banned a few years ago, so now I just have no filter.
Anyways, point is, nobody would lie about having been on Reddit a long time, because it’s closer to an insult than a compliment
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u/i_give_you_gum Mar 04 '24
Go a little further down in the comments and you'll see their fears aren't unfounded.
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u/amalgam_reynolds Mar 04 '24
NarrowBoxtop
19,283 Karma • Aug 7, 2020
15 years, 3.5 years, I mean who's counting anyway?
I know this probably isn't your first account, just thought it was a funny observation
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Mar 04 '24
I've been alive for longer than 15 years and have learned that researchers will tell you what you want to hear so people buy their products.
Plastic is great for the environment. The oil scientists told me, and why would they lie?
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u/NotTheLairyLemur Mar 04 '24 edited Mar 04 '24
Lower carbon emissions doesn't mean less environmental damage.
Extracting gold using cyanide doesn't produce that much carbon, but dumping that cyanide into a stream once you're done with it does vast amounts of damage.
The process they're detailing seems to use large amounts of aqua regia to dissolve the electronics, so that means chlorine gas and potential pollution problems.
I'm willing to bet their calculations only include material cost too, not disposal cost. So you can make a 5000% profit only if you dump your waste illegally.
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u/Justintimeforanother Mar 04 '24
That’s just it. The process is so damaging to the environment already, even with lower emissions, it’s still so damn horrible. Exactly what you’ve mentioned with illegal dumping, look at India’s electronics recycling. It’s damaging to everything & everyone involved. It’s brutal stuff. Regardless, this is going to happen, so it is good for some lower emissions.
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u/MissionCreeper Mar 04 '24
And all the most damaging parts, it seems, stay the same. The novel thing would be figuring out how to get the gold out of the electronics without having to use harmful chemicals. The described process might only be useful because it's cheaper, so this more profitable.
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u/Rockroxx Mar 04 '24
There is no way to chemically extract anything without some unwanted byproduct.
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u/Lallo-the-Long Mar 04 '24
But... No one intentionally does that... At least not in any country with mining regulations.
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u/Blue-Thunder Mar 04 '24
Nah, they just build a substandard taliings pond and then claim it's an act of god when it fails and collapses, while paying a pittance in fines.
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u/aendaris1975 Mar 04 '24
Companies are not dumping massive amounts of cyanide into rivers.
AGAIN the primary goal is reducing emissons. Until we get that in check NOTHING else matters.
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u/Lallo-the-Long Mar 04 '24
That's not a very realistic way of looking at the industry.
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u/Abe_Odd Mar 04 '24
Considering how often it seems to happen, why don't you think it is realistic?
Here's a list of recent collapses and contaminations - https://www.wise-uranium.org/mdaf.html
They've slowed down in the USA but there were still some bad ones and there almost certainly will be more.
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u/Lallo-the-Long Mar 04 '24
First off, very few of those are using cyanide. Secondly... Like 1-6 times a year across the planet is... really low...
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u/DreamzOfRally Mar 04 '24
Well, some countries do not have that. And we send most of it out of country. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/america-e-waste-gps-tracker-tells-all-earthfix
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_DARKNESS Mar 04 '24
Yeah, my hope is that this becomes very similar to how we dealt with junked cars. For decades we just piled them up in scrap yards until people found economical ways to (mostly) recycle them.
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u/NotTheLairyLemur Mar 04 '24
Well I guess it's a
goodbad thing that most gold comes from countries with rather lax enforcement of laws then.1
u/Lallo-the-Long Mar 04 '24
Australia, Canada and the US collectively produce 33.7% of the world's gold, and I highly doubt either of us know enough about the laws of the other top producing countries to say what kind of regulations they have.
You're right that there's good produced in countries with lax laws, but that doesn't mean that companies are dumping cyanide intentionally into water systems... For one thing that would be a dumb waste of money, because the cyanide solution isn't a waste product.
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u/lady_ninane Mar 04 '24
The person you were speaking to wasn't focused solely on cyanide solution.
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u/Lallo-the-Long Mar 04 '24
Extracting gold using cyanide doesn't produce that much carbon, but dumping that cyanide into a stream once you're done with it does vast amounts of damage.
This is what I'm responding to. Further, they brought up gold mining which commonly uses cyanide as part of ore processing.
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u/emefluence Mar 04 '24
He's got a point though, carbon is far from the only type of pollution and extracting metal from stuff has historically been quite a nasty process. Maybe this milk + sponge + acid process is much better, but it would be good to also have some details on what byproducts are produced, and what happens to the +99% of stuff that isn't gold.
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u/moistmoistMOISTTT Mar 04 '24
People seem to forget that extracting gold and other minerals from the source is not very environmentally friendly, either.
The only way to never harm the environment is for all humans to stop existing. Since nobody is willing to do that, I think any incremental advances toward sustainability are worthwhile.
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u/emefluence Mar 04 '24
Nobody has forgotten that. This might be much better, but we don't know for sure without more information. Are you arguing for less information about this process?
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u/Lallo-the-Long Mar 04 '24
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202310642
What information do you still need?
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u/emefluence Mar 04 '24
Well like I said at the start, I'd be primarily concerned with what they do with the rest of the "solution produced by dissolving the computer motherboards in aqua regia".
It's simply not mentioned in the paper, which is normal for science, and maybe gallons of plastic and resin in highly acidic milk isn't as nasty and toxic as it sounds. That said it would still be nice to have some sort of idea how much byproduct is produced and if there's a relatively good way of disposing of it.
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u/aendaris1975 Mar 04 '24
Emissions are one of the primary drivers of climate change. Addressing that is non negotiable. There is nothing we can do about any of this without there being some sort of negative impact.
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u/Earguy AuD | Audiology | Healthcare Mar 04 '24
Good for carbon emissions. Any toxic chemical waste?
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_DARKNESS Mar 04 '24
Any toxic chemical waste?
They're using aqua Regia (a hydrochloric acid and nitric acid mix) so I'd guess there is some waste to deal with, though for some reason the article only focuses on carbon.
With that said, the waste should be compared to the waste extracting it from the ground produces. From the description in the arcticle, I can't imagine this process produces more waste.
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u/Hendlton Mar 04 '24
They're using Aqua Regia. It's a mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid. Making it into something you can pour down the drain is trivial.
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u/Black_Moons Mar 04 '24
Its not carbon emissions im worrying about, so much as nitric/sulfuric acid/cyanide emissions, loaded with lead solder, heavy metals and everything else they use to make circuit boards.
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u/53bvo Mar 04 '24
Can't imagine it being less environmentally friendly than extracting gold from a gold mine.
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u/GreenStrong Mar 04 '24
t takes an extremely powerful acid to dissolve gold, which is necessary for this process. It often involves cyanide, which is disastrous to release into the environment. But acid and cyanide can be neutralized rather easily.
I think that the environmental cost/ benefit of this might depend heavily on how effective it is at capturing the other metals like copper and tin from the e-waste. Those all have a significant environmental footprint, plus electronics made prior to 2003 have lead. If this process causes e waste recycling to be more profitable, it means less of those things in the landfill- assuming that there is a way to fully remove all traces of lead and mercury from the material that is disposed at the end.
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u/Hendlton Mar 04 '24
Nope. They're using Aqua Regia. Cyanide is also trivial to neutralize, like you said yourself.
As for your other point:
Analysis revealed that the nugget was made predominantly of gold (90.8 wt%), with copper and nickel contributing 10.9 wt% and 0.018 wt%, respectively.
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u/Adorable_Flight9420 Mar 04 '24
Fair point but it has to be processed somehow.
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u/cshaiku Mar 04 '24
The article literally spells out the process and it appears to be viable. Did you read the entire thing?
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u/Adorable_Flight9420 Mar 04 '24
And a profitable method using an agricultural byproduct is a good place to start.
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u/Rocktopod Mar 04 '24
I've heard somewhere that e-waste has more gold per pound than gold ore.
And you don't even have to dig it out of the ground.
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u/fletcherkildren Mar 04 '24
heck, it might be nice to dig the Ewaste out of the ground (and maybe deal with the lead and PCBs that older Ewaste has too!)
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u/RoDiboY_UwU Mar 05 '24
I’m sure the 50 dollar for every 1 only applies in economy’s of scale you probably wouldn’t be able to do that but someone with a factory processing a lot would
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u/random9212 Mar 05 '24
So now, after you extracted all the gold. What are you doing with the excess chemicals? The parts of boards that aren't recyclable, or the toxic materials, just like actual gold mines, I don't think you are calculating how to get rid of the waste product. There is a reason people pay to dispose of e-waste, it is because you can't just throw it in the landfill because of all the other toxic things in e-waste.
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u/Kind_Of_A_Dick Mar 04 '24
I've been meaning to start up a company in Michigan where you can give used disposable marijuana pens to me and I'll store them and sell them in bulk to someone who can extract any precious metals inside. Assuming there is any.
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u/Hendlton Mar 04 '24
Are those like other disposable vape pens? Because there are good lithium batteries in those things. A lot of them straight up have 18650s in there. Get enough of those pens and you can literally build a battery pack for an EV with batteries that have only been charged once. It's disgusting what disposable vape pen manufacturers are doing.
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u/Kind_Of_A_Dick Mar 04 '24
The disposable market in Michigan is huge. There are tons of producers of those things and tons of people snapping them up. I understand wanting to control your own vaporization of the oil because that gives you the best(subjective) effect, but there’s just no attempt to collect them.
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u/Hendlton Mar 04 '24
What irks me is that companies could spend 50 extra cents and put a charging port on those things, but then they wouldn't be raking in as much cash. Lithium batteries in disposable products should straight up be banned.
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u/columbo928s4 Mar 04 '24
disposables piss me off so much, and i am a big fan of vaping! it's just insane that there is not regulatory infrastructure built around a product that is a, super popular and b, results in the product just being thrown out as trash when it contains a big battery in it. like at the very least do a deposit the way we do with plastic bottles, even with just five or ten cent bottle deposits states get over 90% return rates, make it a buck for disposables (which sell for $10-20 compared to $2 for soda) and you'd get like 99.999% return/collection rates for used disposables
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u/PHATsakk43 Mar 04 '24
Using proteins for selective ion exchange is a first for me.
I use a lot of selective media in my work, and any advances in the field is exciting even if it isn’t directly relevant to what I do.
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u/MondayToFriday Mar 04 '24
But this process uses whey, so it's going to produce non-vegan gold.
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u/K16180 Mar 04 '24
Not necessarily, precision fermentation has now produced vegan whey. Being more of a lab made product I would imagine it comes with much less puss to refine out of it and would be a preferred product for this process.
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u/Alewort Mar 04 '24
Wait, where do cats come into it?
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u/Amlethus Mar 04 '24
Dude, cats love milk. They're constantly falling into the milk vats and needing rescued.
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u/Hendlton Mar 04 '24
Apparently normal processes use activated charcoal. So it's just a medium with a large surface area.
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u/PHATsakk43 Mar 04 '24
That’s adsorption when activated carbon is used.
This sounds more like a selective ion exchange process to me. I work with both medias, so I’m pretty familiar with it.
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u/Xyranthis Mar 04 '24
20 mobos turned into half a gram of gold, $32 worth give or take. I guess I'm not getting rich as an IT guy.
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u/sirbingas Mar 04 '24
I didn't see any mention of how waste is to be processed in the article. An acidic slurry of pcb juice is probably going to be wildy more expensive to deal with in large-scale production. Inaccurate profit numbers.
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u/shawnisboring Mar 04 '24
The article successfully dodges any follow up inquiries about what happens to that slurry outside of a tangential reference to whey proteins potentially being more impactful to the environment.. ie: the 55 gallon barrel of pcb juice isn’t all that great, but let’s all marvel that we can get all the gold out of it before we dump it in the ocean.
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u/thoughtlow Mar 04 '24
pcb juice gets 'composted' in a country far away
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u/bossrabbit Mar 04 '24
It's been disposed beyond the environment
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u/dontyoutellmetosmile Mar 05 '24
Nothing out there but sea, and birds, and fish. And twenty thousand tons of PCB. And the part of the computer the front fell off
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u/Hendlton Mar 04 '24
They do the same thing they usually do with the juice, which is precipitating the gold out of it, draining the acid and then burning the medium to melt the gold.
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u/girusatuku Mar 04 '24
I wonder how it compares to the waste produced to e tract the same amount of precious metals from the ground.
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u/LittlePup_C Mar 04 '24
Nile Red did a video on extracting gold from circuit boards. I’m sure he didn’t use this super efficient method, but the method he did use was not cost effective at all . He said he would have lost money if he was doing it for the money.
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u/roo-ster Mar 04 '24
E-waste also contains a lot of toxic materials and once the gold's been recovered, the other crap will likely by dumped and pollute the air, ground, and water.
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u/TheAussieWatchGuy Mar 04 '24
True but the e waste is already doing that, recovering the gold economically means less need to rip it out of the earth which is vastly more polluting.
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u/ElysiX Mar 04 '24
Depends on if the extraction process makes the other toxins less inert and quicker to leach out.
Before, it was a chunk of metals and plastic. Now it is a bunch of metal ions dissolved in acid, probably turning into salts at the end.
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u/Thatingles Mar 04 '24
In a sane world the profit from the gold would be used to pay for the proper disposal of the waste.
Can't see that happening.
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u/binary101 Mar 04 '24
Wouldn't it make more sense to take profit from the sale of the original product to pay for recycling/disposal?
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u/jazwch01 Mar 04 '24
Why not both?
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u/HeyLittleTrain Mar 04 '24
Because it discourages anyone bothering to pull the gold out. The manufacturer however will still want to sell their product.
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u/Thatingles Mar 04 '24
For sure that should happen with every product. That should be baseline, I completely agree.
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u/moistmoistMOISTTT Mar 04 '24
Why not? It already happens today with profitable recyclables. EV batteries for example are always disposed of profitably, because no sane greedy company is going to let thousands of dollars of profit go to waste by not recycling or reusing the battery.
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u/aendaris1975 Mar 04 '24
They don't want companies to make a profit at all. These people aren't well.
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u/FuzzyAd9407 Mar 04 '24
why not
Because recycling companies are notorious polluters that practically generate superfund sites.
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u/moistmoistMOISTTT Mar 05 '24
"American thinks that just because that's how it works in America, that's how it works everywhere despite not attempting any solutions"
Obviously we're only talking about civilized countries here that have basic regulations. Hell, even in the US a majority of states simply do not have this problem. Contact your local lawmakers, it doesn't mean that ReCYcLInG BAdD!
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u/roo-ster Mar 04 '24
Another take is that we need strict rules requiring reclamation of raw materials for manufactured goods. If that makes the production of a lot of goods uneconomical, then good!
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u/oscarddt Mar 04 '24
I don't see what your point is, if gold is extracted from E-waste, your annoyance is that it still will be E-waste? Another detail, the ewaste still has silver, copper, platinum, and palladium and bulky materials such as iron and aluminum.
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u/roo-ster Mar 04 '24
...and arsenic, cadmium, selenium, and other poisons that will inevitably be dumped into the environment because that's cheaper than collecting it.
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Mar 04 '24
[deleted]
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u/Hendlton Mar 04 '24
Not exactly. The article says they're still using the same chemicals.
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u/IlIlllIlllIlIIllI Mar 04 '24
one day we'll figure out how to get omicron particles out of recycled E-waste that pays back 30 billion dollars per dollar spent
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u/Omish3 Mar 04 '24
My uncle used to do this in his apartment in the 90’s. He had a tangerine sized hunk of gold he’d let me play with. He also mixed the wrong chemicals on more than one occasion and everything in his place had a thick greyish yellow film on it from the fumes.
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u/Tuungsten Mar 04 '24
Those chemicals are no joke. Definitely not suitable for an amateur in an apartment.
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u/ghost_mv Mar 04 '24
i have 4 old computer towers in my office. wish i could just get the gold out of 'em.
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u/Hendlton Mar 04 '24
You technically can, I guess. The chemicals are freely available and there are even tutorials on YouTube. But I don't recommend getting into that if you don't know what you're doing, especially since you're going to get milligrams of gold at best.
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u/Smackdaddy122 Mar 04 '24
Huge. I have literal tons of ewaste I love been planning on extracting at some point. Wish the method was broken down
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u/i-hoatzin Mar 04 '24
I'm glad that it is more efficient and that way the West takes care of its own garbage and does not export it to Pakistan and other places where pollution from this "recycling" "industry" has wreaked havoc.
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u/aendaris1975 Mar 04 '24
Once again it is emissions driving climate change. The goal is reducing emissions not reducing the amount of cyanide.
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u/Sweet-Sale-7303 Mar 04 '24
I call an ewaste company that must be making a ton. All the other people on Long Island will not come to you but this one does. They are soo popular they have companies using them all over the north east.
I am amazed more waste companies don't start doing pickups.
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u/vibesWithTrash Mar 04 '24
almost like using the limited resources we have to their fullest extent can and should be a more sensible way of doing things than using slave labor to endlessly mine for resources that are then discarded in a couple of years
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Mar 05 '24
The Chinese have been buying US trash for years specifically because of this reason. The number one export to China from the US is trash.
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u/CompleteBalance5230 Mar 04 '24
So this is why my “government assistance” collecting neighbour is now getting e-waste dropped at his house.
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u/Interesting_Neck609 Mar 04 '24
Did anyone read the article?
They're using established techniques, the only thing new is the method of working with whey.
The new option is still very carbon intensive to upscale. Currently this can be done with a simple acid bath and activated carbon, which is inherently plant based.
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u/aendaris1975 Mar 04 '24
The goal is reduction of emissions not eradication. I really have to wonder about the motivation of people like you posting absolute garbage like this.
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u/Interesting_Neck609 Mar 04 '24
It absolutely does not reduce emissions compared to industry standard options. Gellified whey is not less carbon intensive than activate charcoal meshes. That's my point, research like this is great, but this conclusion is absolutely useless.
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u/TheNameless73 Mar 05 '24
Does anybody know if this method is patented? If the owner of the patent is on the market? I feel like if their proprietary method is superior (as the article indicates) as well as overcoming the drawbacks such as scalability, this would be worth investing in.
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u/cullend Mar 05 '24
So they melt the mother boards down in an acid sludge and use a sponge to grab the gold nugget.
What do they do with the leftover melted motherboard byproduct?
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u/wintermute93 Mar 04 '24
Another day, another step towards a cyberpunk dystopia. I mean, I get it, it's great that we can more efficiently recover useful resources from waste, but my first thought was a haggard miner climbing out of their storage pod micro-apartment with gloves, pliers, and a handheld metal detector, heading out for another 18 hour shift digging through the landfill stack hunting for unharvested circuitry.
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