There may be something new about the process here, but there are other processing plants that recover gold from e-waste. Umicore has a plant in Belgium which does this.
Do you know much about the process in Belgium? I've been trying to learn more about proper handling of e-waste in the country; there's not much information available. The companies I know just chuck it in the all-purpose bin with batteries removed.
The batteries are first separated from the phones; this happens elsewhere. The remainder of the phones arrive at the processing plant in Hoboken (near Antwerp) and are shredded.
Each batch of finely shredded material is analyzed for its content to determine value and to choose processing details.
After shredding and analysis, the material goes into a large (15 meter high) smelting oven. (The burning of plastic from the phones contributes to the heat, but it's not the main heat source. Probably natural gas?) Sulfur is recovered from the gasses coming from the oven to produce sulfuric acid, which is used in processes further downstream or sold.
The oven produces a batch of molten metal, which is then separated in stages through chemistry. E.g. oxygen is injected and some metals react with this and the oxides float to the top. A bunch of other chemistry is done. Some stuff may go to another oven.
The recovered metals are either returned to the supplier of the input material, or sold by Umicore itself. They sell gold at https://umicoregoldshop.be , though I'm not sure whether it's all from e-waste.
I think the "world first" here is that a national Mint is going to use the process to recover precious metals. AFICT, Britain's Royal Mint is the only first world Mint actively pursuing e-waste and precious metal recovery.
The process is not exactly novel as it's done all around the world, but the key point here may be the "chemistry" that it will use. That makes me think of some type of dissolving solution that frees the metal to then be collected electromechanically.
Then Royal Mint already have everything in place to monetize the Gold though, so it's hardly surprising it's priority. This is also a pretty shrewd ESG play - in the future more Gold can be included in to ESG funds because it's not being mined in say...China and Russia, the worlds top 2 producers.
This is off topic, but I'm deeply curious what a plant to recycle lithium batteries looks like.
I believe they'd be handling almost every form of matter, from solid lithium to liquid electolyte, the combustion gasses of bad batteries blowing up, and the plasma of the fire itself.
Seems like a hell of a challenge and I'd love to hear all about it.
Awesome! but they keep the interesting part secret (how to prevent fires during the actual recycling, how to deal with a plant that handles bombs before they are in the recycling process itself)
TLDR rather than traditional high-temperature or extremely acidic solvents, they have a room-temperature gold-specific solvent.
I'd still like a little more detail about how the process works; how do they delaminate boards? What happens to the tin solder, the FR4, and other bits and pieces?
From what I understand(and someone can correct me if I am wrong), FR4 is an epoxy material that cannot really be broken down so what is done is that the boards are ground up and then the copper is extracted from the powder. Not sure what happens to the rest.
And still ship the leftover waste to poor countries? Whenever I read "circular economy" I want to smash my head into a wall.
Just so you understand where that's coming from: I worked for one of the largest appliance recycling companies in the UK.
I watched as hundreds of thousands of perfectly good spare parts were thrown away and like 80% of the incoming shipments being reshipped to India and Africa. They did resell whole appliances for seemingly unprofitable prices, though. Several flooded flats and even electrical fires because of piss poor testing.
I watched as people were poisoned (lead from CRTs, whatever the fuck is in fridge lining and compressors) in their factory because of extremely poor H&S. Actually, was affected myself, now I have to beg for a very simple medicine for the rest of my life.
I watched as people were fired on the spot after getting in accidents (due to said poor H&S) and got zero compensation.
They were dumping toxic chemicals in the local sewage system while getting 4-5 star ratings from the environment agency.
Ran by greedy, dumb management, I swear the company exists just to get government funding instead of actually being useful or turning a profit.
Switzerland does something similar with what is left after trash has been burned. It is against the law for the left over ash (schlake) to contain more than 1% of metal.
Therefore they extract it and sell it making a profit.
Nothing really new.. I've seen this happening 20 years ago at smaller scale.
Problem is these people often dumped every other natural resource that was not worth as much.. I hope that won't happen here. Edit: According to the article they will recycle less popular elements as well. I hope so...
I distinctly remember a TV programme from the 1980s which mentioned the large gold content (probably larger back then) of electronics and how companies were recycling it. Nothing new at all.
It definitely was larger yes. Almost every contact was gold-plated back then. And thicker too.
Part of this was necessity, due to everything being analog signal noise ratios were a lot more important. Gold stops contacts from oxidising. But electronics are also produced in a much more minimalist way, both to conserve cost and materials (these being good things) but also because they don't care if it lasts beyond the warranty period. The latter is obviously a bad thing. In the 1980s if your TV broke you'd go to a repairman, you wouldn't buy a new one. It's kind of crazy how we've come to accept electronics only lasting 2-3 years.
How many retro computers or interesting old hardware will be lost? I hope they have some kind of rudimentary sorting to detect old hardware that may be of interest to collectors.
Aside from electronic waste, if you ever happen to be in South Wales you can visit the Royal Mint and it is quite fascinating.
They strike coins not just for the UK but also quite a few other nations. They also make the precursor alloy mixes for quite a few more nations, who then only do the striking part for their national currency. All in all, there is a possibility your nation's coins may have in part been made there.
The exhibition they have explains it better than I can and you can see out onto part of the factory floor. I also got to strike a coin... Well... The machine struck it but I pressed "please strike it". So. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon if you are there.
It also costs money to make money. Minting coins isn't free: you need the right cupronickel mix or whatever they're using so that the coin matches specifications. This is an industrial process like any other.
Also not all of the countries ask the mint to actually mint. They're buying "flans" i.e. coin shaped metal that hasn't been struck yet, just prepared according to spec. They strike the coins themselves.
As others have noted I think it really also depends what your domestic situation is, i.e. can the whole process be done in a cost effective and safe way where you are? If not... This is just the cloud but for country tokens ;)
Another British company makes banknotes for "over 69 national currencies" [1].
From the website [2] I can see England, Gibraltar, Seychelles, Macedonia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Solomon Islands, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Qatar, Fiji, São Tomé e Príncipe, ...
40 comments
[ 13.0 ms ] story [ 297 ms ] threadhttps://www.umicore.com/en/about/recycling/
Each batch of finely shredded material is analyzed for its content to determine value and to choose processing details.
After shredding and analysis, the material goes into a large (15 meter high) smelting oven. (The burning of plastic from the phones contributes to the heat, but it's not the main heat source. Probably natural gas?) Sulfur is recovered from the gasses coming from the oven to produce sulfuric acid, which is used in processes further downstream or sold.
The oven produces a batch of molten metal, which is then separated in stages through chemistry. E.g. oxygen is injected and some metals react with this and the oxides float to the top. A bunch of other chemistry is done. Some stuff may go to another oven.
The recovered metals are either returned to the supplier of the input material, or sold by Umicore itself. They sell gold at https://umicoregoldshop.be , though I'm not sure whether it's all from e-waste.
[0] https://yewtu.be/watch?v=kxlmTRWeppM
The process is not exactly novel as it's done all around the world, but the key point here may be the "chemistry" that it will use. That makes me think of some type of dissolving solution that frees the metal to then be collected electromechanically.
For example Palladium-Gold catalysts (CO2 reduction) or nano particle gold plating (PV solar) or AuNPs (medical)
I believe they'd be handling almost every form of matter, from solid lithium to liquid electolyte, the combustion gasses of bad batteries blowing up, and the plasma of the fire itself.
Seems like a hell of a challenge and I'd love to hear all about it.
(extracting gold is simpler, by comparison, and can be done at home by the sufficiently motivated- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASQCa7mfjVo)
https://www.cheminst.ca/magazine/article/saskatchewan-chemis...
And these appear to be their patents for the leachant: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180112289A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180142322A1/en
TLDR rather than traditional high-temperature or extremely acidic solvents, they have a room-temperature gold-specific solvent.
I'd still like a little more detail about how the process works; how do they delaminate boards? What happens to the tin solder, the FR4, and other bits and pieces?
Hops on vpn to Canada, reloads page, watches cool 4 year old video. CBC serves me some ads and gets another MAU.
I wish I felt like I was doing something bad.
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_LPejkU8rE
Just so you understand where that's coming from: I worked for one of the largest appliance recycling companies in the UK.
I watched as hundreds of thousands of perfectly good spare parts were thrown away and like 80% of the incoming shipments being reshipped to India and Africa. They did resell whole appliances for seemingly unprofitable prices, though. Several flooded flats and even electrical fires because of piss poor testing.
I watched as people were poisoned (lead from CRTs, whatever the fuck is in fridge lining and compressors) in their factory because of extremely poor H&S. Actually, was affected myself, now I have to beg for a very simple medicine for the rest of my life.
I watched as people were fired on the spot after getting in accidents (due to said poor H&S) and got zero compensation.
They were dumping toxic chemicals in the local sewage system while getting 4-5 star ratings from the environment agency.
Ran by greedy, dumb management, I swear the company exists just to get government funding instead of actually being useful or turning a profit.
Therefore they extract it and sell it making a profit.
https://www.srf.ch/play/tv/redirect/detail/d8f14e5f-c921-446... (Swiss German)
Problem is these people often dumped every other natural resource that was not worth as much.. I hope that won't happen here. Edit: According to the article they will recycle less popular elements as well. I hope so...
Part of this was necessity, due to everything being analog signal noise ratios were a lot more important. Gold stops contacts from oxidising. But electronics are also produced in a much more minimalist way, both to conserve cost and materials (these being good things) but also because they don't care if it lasts beyond the warranty period. The latter is obviously a bad thing. In the 1980s if your TV broke you'd go to a repairman, you wouldn't buy a new one. It's kind of crazy how we've come to accept electronics only lasting 2-3 years.
They strike coins not just for the UK but also quite a few other nations. They also make the precursor alloy mixes for quite a few more nations, who then only do the striking part for their national currency. All in all, there is a possibility your nation's coins may have in part been made there.
The exhibition they have explains it better than I can and you can see out onto part of the factory floor. I also got to strike a coin... Well... The machine struck it but I pressed "please strike it". So. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon if you are there.
That's a surprising amount of trust
Well, maybe not entirely. War is an exception: http://www.psywarrior.com/BritishForgeriesWWI.html vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bernhard (Nazi Germany forging British notes)
It also costs money to make money. Minting coins isn't free: you need the right cupronickel mix or whatever they're using so that the coin matches specifications. This is an industrial process like any other.
Also not all of the countries ask the mint to actually mint. They're buying "flans" i.e. coin shaped metal that hasn't been struck yet, just prepared according to spec. They strike the coins themselves.
As others have noted I think it really also depends what your domestic situation is, i.e. can the whole process be done in a cost effective and safe way where you are? If not... This is just the cloud but for country tokens ;)
From the website [2] I can see England, Gibraltar, Seychelles, Macedonia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Solomon Islands, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Qatar, Fiji, São Tomé e Príncipe, ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_La_Rue
[2] https://www.delarue.com/currency/overview?hsLang=en-gb