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E-Waste Mining Could Be Big Business (bbc.com)
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.
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 make this work.
You can try and avoid a lot of that stuff by purchasing up used CPUs, RAM, etc (basically anything from 1980-2004 is going to have a lot of gold in it). Old Pentium processors (P54C) for example, are riddled with the stuff. However everyone else has the exact same idea so the prices of such components are going up if you wanna buy them in bulk for recycling purposes (otherwise you have to strip down an entire computer and deal with all the waste that creates... eating into your profits once more).
In other words, I don't think this is going to work. E-waste recycling has and always will be operated at a loss. It's just something countries are going to have to deal with because the waste needs to go somewhere and I doubt China is going to be taking our junk for much longer. If you could actually turn a profit (note that TFA isn't, they say they might in a few years...), then everyone would be leaping on this because there's absolutely no shortage of materials to "mine".
Companies that take dedicated recycling have trouble staying afloat. You think paying people minimum wage to distinguish between an "oooo, $0.10 glass bottle" vs "ooo, $0.20 in that plastic thing" in a typical garbage stream is really gonna get you more plastic things?
not sure why this is an article now. I know people that were doing this in Australia over 20 years ago, though they tended to focus more on old mainframe components due to the high amounts of gold they could yield from them
because recycling the old steel is more profitable. To be fair we also don't build infrastructure anymore (thanks to 40 years of non-stop tax cuts) so we don't need very much of it.
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The USA is the only country in the world that doesn't use the metric system. Right.
450g = 1 pound (rounded)
227g = 1/2 pound (exactly)
5.6g = 1/5 ounce (exactly)
Foreigners use customary units too, they just convert them for public consumption. Once you know this, you start seeing it all the time. For example, European airlines always have a 23-kg (50-pound) bag weight limit. Why 23? Because it's 50 pounds.
Are these numbers right? 5.6g gold per TV sounds too high. That is about 1/5oz, which would be worth about 250$.
Shit, get creimer a pair of size 13 workboots and he'll dig to the bottom of a e-waste dump for 45$ of silver!
using bulky old CRTs as an example what are the fuel miles like to just move the equipment to the recycling place(s)? maybe we are at a point where we need to throw everything we can in to making excess power so our vehicles are all electric and power is so cheap old kit could be kept ticking over and doing something. layer between a wall with say 30 P4s on mobos for central heating, or even just get away with using that old laptop as a dedicated tv computer rather than a new set top box every year or so. plastics/CRTs/circuit boards/hazzardous materials are the issue as everything else seems to already have someone with a hook up at the recycling centre making decent money.
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 simply because of the huge mass of pins driving the display array.
...5.6g of gold. In a TV. Right. CRT. At 40 USD a gram, that well over 200 USD in gold. In a TV. Right. CRT. Hahah. These ewasters wind up as ewaste in a few years.
that's the party that doesn't show up in the stats. We're contracting as a nation. We stopped building in the 70s. Hell, large parts of our cities are being demolished to avoid the high cost of maintaining the grid (electric, water, phone, etc). I remember a story during the Obama era where they were buying out homes in Detroit for enough to buy houses elsewhere just so they didn't have to try maintaining the grid there.
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And e-waste has been pushed as the new gold rush for years.
It can be profitable, if your processing humongous quantities...
But its no gold rush!
According to the World Steel Association's numbers the U.S. is actually the FOURTH largest producer of raw steel at 81.6 million metric tons, which is 4.83% of the world's total production of 1,689 million tonnes. India is #3 (101.4 million tonnes), Japan is #2 (104.7 million tonnes) and China is far and away #1 with 831.7 million tonnes of production. The U.S. beat out Russia at #5 (71.3 million metric tons).
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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If you can't make a business case for recovering concentrated, previously refined material, right here on Earth with existing technology, or barely more advanced than what we already have...
then what is the value in asteroid mining with its orders of magnitude lower concentration, absurd time and distance constraints, and non-existent technology for fully automated unmanned zero-g mining technology??
Reclaiming this stuff involves acid and all sorts of other toxic materials. And no company would just bury this stuff would they?!! Basically the West outsourcing their pollution...
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.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
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.
because recycling the old steel is more profitable
And because it's cheaper to import.
Not quite sure how this professor did the modeling research, but I'm guessing there's no literature study on state of the art involved.
e-waste has been a valuable resource for years.
https://www.jacomij.com/en/
https://www.kh-metals.nl/en/el...
Nothing new.
Belarus mostly fills National Bank gold reserve from electronic waste.
http://unidragmet.by/o-nas
my old disk drives for the magnets. Those actuator mags are pretty strong. I know the ones from the 90's had a nice fairly heavy machined aluminum housing that would have been trivial to recover. The new ones not so much.
And also, we haven't "pretty much quit making steel" in the US.
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. Also the USGS spreadsheets are excellent.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
No research is done by scientists. Scientists use metric.
Not sure if retarded or trolling ....
Typically profitable extraction is kept hush hush. But I wonder if street sweepers are keeping the dust to extract platinum from it. At the very least, the dust is sold off.
Everyone is sure your faggot Republican INCEL ass has nothing to do with science however, c6 you dumbass faggot poser.
I'm new to this century, but aren't MOST online usernames considered "fake" in the sense that they are pseudonyms - not someone's REAL name?
Ah. So ... retarded then.
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 anymore either.
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.
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...
The left almost ruined out steel industry.
http://www.newser.com/story/25... Oh those wealthy people...
"P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME"
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"UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME"
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Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You're replying to a literal slashdot retard, so don't bother asking.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.