Scrap Gold Recovery?

[iampoor]

Hi

Does anyone have any experience with gold recovery from scrap electronics? Things like Memmory boards, CPU pins, and gold fingers from connectors.
I am wondering if recovering gold from these would be a viable option, or if it is too risky/a waste of time. Might be a nice micro business.   

[Falcon69]

I explored this opportunity once.

From what I found out, unless you're doing a LARGE quantity (and only the gold plated fingers of cards are worth while, as they contain thicker gold), like a truck load, then it is not worth it. The cost of chemicals to extract the gold could cost more than the gold itself, unless you can buy the chemicals at below wholesale cost.

So, I gave up on doing this myself.

[Ian.M]

There's also the toxic waste issue.  At the volumes required to make it economic, it isn't practical as a hobby, (nor would you want to risk making your home the next superfund site) so you will have to run a proper business, which means the EPA will be down on you like a ton of bricks if you don't do everything right first time and every subsequent time, with all the proper paperwork and permits.

[Brumby]

A while back I had a look at this process as just something of interest, not as an opportunity as such - and my conclusions were pretty much the same as this:

I explored this opportunity once.

From what I found out, unless you're doing a LARGE quantity (and only the gold plated fingers of cards are worth while, as they contain thicker gold), like a truck load, then it is not worth it. The cost of chemicals to extract the gold could cost more than the gold itself, unless you can buy the chemicals at below wholesale cost.

So, I gave up on doing this myself.

This was also a factor...

There's also the toxic waste issue.

[IanB]

Does anyone have any experience with gold recovery from scrap electronics? Things like Memmory boards, CPU pins, and gold fingers from connectors.
I am wondering if recovering gold from these would be a viable option, or if it is too risky/a waste of time. Might be a nice micro business.   

See here: (it's not really worth it, other than for fun)

[Stray Electron]

  I have a couple of friends that are VERY large surplus dealers and they get a lot of OLD but very high quality scrap equipment like the old HP and Tektronix equipment that contained a lot of gold scrap.  They've all tried to get into gold recovery and they just couldn't make it work economically.  For one thing the costs of the necessary chemicals was much too high unless they were located in a highly industrial area with ready access to chemicals such as sulfuric and nitric acid, various cyanides, zinc dust, etc.  Shipping large amounts of hazardous material is VERY expensive!  Disposing of the spent scrap material contaminated with heavy metals like lead, chromium, etc was also a huge problem in most parts of the country.  Again it had to go to a heavily industrialized area that could dispose of it "properly" in a toxic waste dump, or more realistically, corrupt enough to make it simply disappear!  As it ended up, all of that was pretty much available only in New Jersey. Long story short, even though they got the scrap for next to nothing, they couldn't ever make any money from the gold scrap; too much labor, too high transportation costs, too many expensive chemicals, too much red tape, too many problems disposing of the heavy metal waste, etc.  Oh and I forgot to mention, the gold recovery companies are NOTORIOUS for cheating their customers.

   FWIW I always save my gold scrap and use it as trade material to scrap dealers when they have something that I want. Virtually everyone of them that I've ever meet goes absolutely nuts for gold scrap and many of them WILL not sell anything with an significant amount of gold scrap in it. So if it's something that I want, I pull out some of my gold scrap and swap that to them along with a few dollars and that keeps them happy.

[EEVblog]

This guy scraps everything from boards:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMNtGapF13fwDLMR_sHmi6g/videos
And I thought the Couch Feet Guy was a bit eccentric...

[Shadetreeprops]

Hi

Does anyone have any experience with gold recovery from scrap electronics? Things like Memmory boards, CPU pins, and gold fingers from connectors.
I am wondering if recovering gold from these would be a viable option, or if it is too risky/a waste of time. Might be a nice micro business.   

Yes have a ton of experience. what do you want to do exactly.

Cheapest method, Get Muratic Acid, and Hydrogen peroxcide, mix a 75% muratic Acid mix, to 25% hydrogen peroxcide, throw all the PCBs, and other gold materials into it, let sit for 24 hours and check on it. Better to do in a warm enviroment helps the reaction. or you can youse a pyrex beaker set on a sand bed over a hot plate set to low.



This method disolves the Nickle and copper and the Gold floats off the board.

Then you must clean and filter this solution out.


Next you need take your filters and wash them out using distiled water, and then low boil off the water. so not to evaporate micro gold.


Then you need Nitric Acid and Hydrocloric, HLC for short.

This is going to be a 75% 25% mix of Nitric to HLC, this makes Aqua Regia...this will disolve off the gold..add one or 2 drops of sulfuric acid to keep the lead in the solution. so that the gold will percipitate from solution alot more pure. you make have to refine it a few times to get 99.999 percent gold.


MEASUREMENTS ARE KEY IN THIS...if you  mix to much AQ when you start to use Sodium Metabisulfate AKA STUMP OUT...then the gold will keep disoloving back into the solution. and you must also slowly add the STUMP OUT..so not to over add too much..


then wash and dry the brownish copper mud using washes of hot HLC, until there is no more GREEN tint, and then do a few washes with DISTILED WATER.


the remaining powered is PURE GOLD..melt into buttons, or bars depending on how much powder you have..

depending on the quality of your electronics, gold ammounts may vary..but i find doing pins or lead to be the most profitable of it all. ten pounds of RAM will get you ruffly 2-10g of pure gold depending on quality of ram.

i did this for a while...

there are tons of methods to do all this..and sites, and forums, as well, and books.. the best one REFINING PRECIOUS METAL WASTE BY: C.M. Hoke very very expensive book..i happen to have it... im sure you could get a knock of for less.

[zapta]

This guy scraps everything from boards:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMNtGapF13fwDLMR_sHmi6g/videos
And I thought the Couch Feet Guy was a bit eccentric...

This could be an interesting eevblog episode, a small scale gold extraction from scrap electronics. Something that will allow you to buy, let's say, a very cheap DMM. It will open a window to the end if life side of electronics and design for recycling.

[IanB]

As Cody noted in the videos I linked above, the cost in raw materials (and time) exceeds the value of the gold you get. If you want pure gold, it is cheaper just to buy it.

[amyk]

As of this post, gold is around $40 USD/g...

[mikeselectricstuff]

The problem is modern stuff doesn't have much gold - it's all very thin platings. Older stuff from the 60s and 70s, when gold was much cheaper might be viable but there's not much of that around any more

[Shadetreeprops]

The problem is modern stuff doesn't have much gold - it's all very thin platings. Older stuff from the 60s and 70s, when gold was much cheaper might be viable but there's not much of that around any more

this is true and false at the same time. true when you are small scale like i was, but if you know where to look, and only harvest the high yeild materials, then profit will come.

that is why when using Reverse electroplating, or the hydrogen peroxcide and muratic acid method, was the cheap route, as both of those allow you to reuse the solution many times over, reducing chemical cost.

to do reverse electroplating of gold.

get a copper mesh basket, and Sulfuric acid only..place inside a cell aka pyrex dish, use a 12V batter charger, or anything with low volts high amps..a charger of some type.

hook the NEG to the mesh basket holding your gold. and the pos to an anode, i mae a lead plate..and turn it on, it will pull the gold into the solution, and you can use this cell for ages before you will have to put fresh sulfuric into it. bunch of videos on this too.

i will offer my help on this matter. as the community that normally dose this, and has its own forum. are very tight with their secrets, and do not readily let go of any iformation..they basically all tell you to FAIL, FAIL..until you get it right...becasue they do not want you walking out the door doing what they spent years prefecting themselves. they were actually very rude with me. so after a week of asking questions, i finally stopped going to the forum on it..becasue they all had rude stuff to say offering little in the way of help.

kinda messed up if you ask me.

[EEVblog]

This could be an interesting eevblog episode, a small scale gold extraction from scrap electronics. Something that will allow you to buy, let's say, a very cheap DMM. It will open a window to the end if life side of electronics and design for recycling.

I had a field trip planned for this topic, I have to follow up on a contact who was getting me the suitable clearances...

[metalphreak]

I find the only people who tell you it's a worthwhile small-scale venture, are the people trying to sell you bulk lots of old e-waste. If it was worthwhile, why aren't they doing it themselves 

[DenzilPenberthy]

A friend of mine worked on filming this for the BBC: backstreet gold recovery in India. Mostly from tiny specks washed into the sewers in a jewelery producing district. It in not easy work or exactly what you would call environmentally friendly

[Ian.M]

Typically modern PCB finishes that involve a gold layer have 0.05um to 0.1um  gold.  That's 9.6 to 19.3 g/sqm.   Hard gold for edge connectors can run as thick as 2um, 380g/sqm.  Wire-bondable soft gold can run as thick as  0.8um, 150g/sqm but usually a lot less

That means that at current prices of around 44$/g you have to strip the gold off a vast area of PCB or off a much more reasonable area of old thick plated edge connectors, very cheaply.  However, back in the early years of the millennium, Gold was as low as 8.9$/g which would have made gold recovery in most cases uneconomic.

1um == 1micron.  Density of gold = 19300Kg/m^3

[wkb]

Typically modern PCB finishes that involve a gold layer have 0.05um to 0.1um  gold.  That's 9.6 to 19.3 g/sqm.   Hard gold for edge connectors can run as thick as 2um, 380g/sqm.  Wire-bondable soft gold can run as thick as  0.8um, 150g/sqm but usually a lot less

That means that at current prices of around 44$/g you have to strip the gold off a vast area of PCB or off a much more reasonable area of old thick plated edge connectors, very cheaply.  However, back in the early years of the millennium, Gold was as low as 8.9$/g which would have made gold recovery in most cases uneconomic.

1um == 1micron.  Density of gold = 19300Kg/m^3

Well.. people take apart whole mountains for gold ore.  Electronic waste (the older builds the better, given more gold was used in the old days) typically has a higher gold content than that ground down mountain

[Shadetreeprops]

This could be an interesting eevblog episode, a small scale gold extraction from scrap electronics. Something that will allow you to buy, let's say, a very cheap DMM. It will open a window to the end if life side of electronics and design for recycling.

I had a field trip planned for this topic, I have to follow up on a contact who was getting me the suitable clearances...

yes you need to do this, even possible add a section to the forums about it. it sort of goes hand in hand, a way to make some cash to fun for EE hobby life, off electronics that have gone poof.. you could make a killer vid too, casue you would be in depth and fun..

[Shadetreeprops]

my method of doing whole boards was. cut it to peices, and smash it to hell with a hammer. to expose all the gold..toss into my 5 gal bucket mix of muratic and hydrogen perocide.

let sit for a week in a warm place. come back. drain rinse, wash, filter. purify...but it was a all day thing..i think in my time i pulled $25k workth of gold out in one year.

but by now, people like CatalinaWoW knows where i get all my electronics from..hehehe..military grade toss outs..plenty of gold there. no buying e-waste.

finally i just started to sell the e-waste buy grades A, B , C high yelild medium and low. i could normally get $350 easy per 10 pounds of high yeild pins, for PCB it was about 150 for high yeild pcb..but i was undercutting everyone to dump as much stock as i could..

I still have a bunch, that i now go though looking for parts when i get time..

wish like hell i could make a career out of my hobbies..but the pay is not there to take care of the family.

[Artlav]

Am i the only one who looked at that thread - https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/laser-cleaning/ and contemplated that maybe you can use this sort of a laser to turn whatever scrap you have into plasma or fine dust, to then be separated into elements by some physical process, thus avoiding all the chemical work?

Would that work?
I think they only do it for uranium enrichment and isotope separation in general, which suggests it won't be cheap enough to matter.

[station240]

The problem is modern stuff doesn't have much gold - it's all very thin platings. Older stuff from the 60s and 70s, when gold was much cheaper might be viable but there's not much of that around any more

I've got 1/2Kg of ICs from that era, hoarded away simply because they were interesting.
Be interesting to find out what percentage of the total weight is gold,

This sort of package.

[zapta]

If anybody manages to extract some gold send it to the EEVBlog mailbag so Dave tear it down.

[iampoor]

Thanks for all the replys guys. The muriatic acid method that shadetreeprops mentioned seemed the cheapest, but yeah, unless you can get the scrap for free, it certainly doesnt seem worth it.

What caught my interest initially was this auction.....when it was 1$. Didnt realize how much people pay for this stuff...... 
http://www.ebay.com/itm/322039114428?_trksid=p2060353.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

[ConKbot]

Thanks for all the replys guys. The muriatic acid method that shadetreeprops mentioned seemed the cheapest, but yeah, unless you can get the scrap for free, it certainly doesnt seem worth it.

What caught my interest initially was this auction.....when it was 1$. Didnt realize how much people pay for this stuff...... 
http://www.ebay.com/itm/322039114428?_trksid=p2060353.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

http://www.ebay.com/itm/20-Pentium-Pro-Ceramic-Scrap-Gold-Cpu-Processor-Recovery-Vintage-Chip-Collect/322039116272?_trksid=p2047675.c100009.m1982&_trkparms=aid%3D777000%26algo%3DABA.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D35830%26meid%3D95260ae8413846f4848b537edf8d9bae%26pid%3D100009%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26sd%3D322039117269

20 pentium pros, $237, spot price of gold is $40/gram, 6 grams of gold in the batch or 300 mg per processor to break even w/o counting acid.  19.32 grams per cc for gold, 0.0155cc or about 15.5 mm^3 per processor. Even at a wastefully thick 5 microns, that would need 3100 mm^2 or 31 cm^2 of gold plated area in the package. Seems dubious unless that solder around the lid has quite a lot of gold content.