Royal Mint to build ‘world first’ plant to turn UK’s electronic waste into gold
royalmint.com
royalmint.com
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.
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, ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Therefore they extract it and sell it making a profit.
https://www.srf.ch/play/tv/redirect/detail/d8f14e5f-c921-446... (Swiss German)
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)
For example Palladium-Gold catalysts (CO2 reduction) or nano particle gold plating (PV solar) or AuNPs (medical)