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.

Comments

Re: Gold mines don't deal with horrible byproducts

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Khyber]

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.

Re:In the US we've pretty much stopped making stee

[crunchygranola]

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.

Re: It's mostly from recycling

[reanjr]

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.