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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".
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Most electronics recycling companies are junking the plastics, and only recycling what's on the boards or other components, then junking the boards and component remnants as well.
They're not giving a shit about the plastics, since that's not what they're after. They want that gold, copper, silver, aluminum, iridium, platinum, and such.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That's $200 in gold TODAY. Not when the TV's were manufactured or disposed of. When's the last time a CRT rolled off the production lines?
Hell, in the 80's, gold was around $200/ounce, that pulls the price per gram down to around $6. The 50's, 60's, 70's... Gold was even cheaper.. And TV's were fucking EXPENSIVE.
Of course, you're too busy being an ass to think about that.. Well, either that or you are twelve...