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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".
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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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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Detroit has it's own problems with the residents. Any abandoned house becomes a crackhouse. The druggies then raid other homes, street lights and traffic lights for copper to resell for drug money. Anyone who tries to renovate property to make a profit is like to find themselves having squatters with the full support of the police and city.
It then becomes more cost-effective to demolish abandoned properties, especially if they have water damage and mold.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I thought the same thing, but I googled the historical price of gold and it was far cheaper before 2004 when CRTs still still common (roughly between $250-400 per oz from the late 80s to around 2004). Still, it would raise the question of why you haven't seen people offering money for old CRTs since gold has been in the $1000+ per oz range, which has been at least 8 years. Nor do I really understand why it would be so hard to recycle. I have a friend who works as a dental ceramist, and they periodically send off the dust collected from the grinders, old dental work they accumulate, and even the dust in their carpets to assaying labs where separate all the various metals from each other and the ceramics and other detritus, and they pay a pretty good return for the value of the precious metals extracted. If they can do *that* profitably, it seems inconceivable to me that they couldn't do the same for discarded electronics, especially if there is anything like 5.6 grams of gold in a typical CRT. I'd be interested if anyone could shed some light on that.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Most electronics recycling companies are junking the plastics, and only recycling what's on the boards or other components, then junking the boards and component remnants as well.
They're not giving a shit about the plastics, since that's not what they're after. They want that gold, copper, silver, aluminum, iridium, platinum, and such.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Are these numbers right? 5.6g gold per TV sounds too high. That is about 1/5oz, which would be worth about 250$.
Back in 1990 when that TV was likely made those 5.6 ounces would only have been worth about $70. Given that a decent size set cost $600+ it's not that outlandish to think the gold in it made up ~10% of the total cost.
A "free" work force to take everything apart and get it ready. So only the very best parts get metals extracted from them.
Who can be expected to do a task again and again with the skills to get past plastic and any RF exposure compliance to the parts that make a profit? For free.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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...
Actually... yes, it is. The numbers are indeed off; these aren't Pentium Pros we're talking about.
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
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.