I need some advice from the experts. A friends cousins uncles brother has about 10k pounds of 5+ year old circuit boards and memory chips/sticks. Is there a feasible way to extract the gold from them? We have some spare gold mining equipment and one of the people involved is swearing you can use the gold mining equipment to crush the boards into a powder and somehow extract the gold with no chemicals. I've researched this a tiny bit in the past and have always seen this done with chemicals which we don't want to get into. Could we possibly use a stong electromagnet to get the gold from the powder? Also what would we do with the powder when were done? Would this be toxic waste and need to pay to be removed. I know this doesn't exactly fit the topics on this forum but I have faith there are some really smart people here who will know about this. Thanks for any help you can give.

 

There are companies that will pay per pound and do all the messy work. Probably better off with that method.

CPUs probably have the most gold in them and the fingers that connect to board to motherboard type stuff.

 

There are companies that will pay per pound and do all the messy work. Probably better off with that method.

Yah thats what were doing now. Was trying to see if there is a way we can do the messy work ourselves. We have a 25k s/f factory sitting empty and this mining equipment already so I'm just trying to see if its even feasible to do ourselves.

 

Back in my days as a machine maintenance tech for Alcatel we used iodine etchant, to make lithographic boards where gold was the traces. The effluent (iodine etch with gold) was captured in a large epoxy filter, it was my job to replace the filter material when it became saturated. We sent this material to our company chemist to recover the gold, quite a bit was recovered this way. It was almost an afterthought, the filtered water was clean enough for city waste water.

I know it is practical, and you don't need to grind up the PCBs, but I don't know the commercial process for it.

You can probably find someone who will do if for a percentage of the recovery.

 

You may not own all the pc boards,there are certain recycle regulations
that say agencies of the locations own discarded materials for recycle.
You might be looking at permits to use space,such as E.P.A.. The
companies that make money have this stuff given to them as recycle
trash with connections and permits. When you pay your water bill you
authorize to give your trash away,that Included recycle materials.
If It was easy there would no question.

 

I'd never heard that before, but it doesn't surprise me.

 

I believe Rare Earth Magnetic Rolls are used nowadays to recover precious metals from dirt, as long as the precious metals have some para-magnetic properties.

Cheers, DPW [ Everyone's knowledge is in-complete...Albert Einstein]

 

You may not own all the pc boards,there are certain recycle regulations
that say agencies of the locations own discarded materials for recycle.
You might be looking at permits to use space,such as E.P.A.. The
companies that make money have this stuff given to them as recycle
trash with connections and permits. When you pay your water bill you
authorize to give your trash away,that Included recycle materials.
If It was easy there would no question.

I'm pretty sure we own em and we can get many more. We do have contacts in the industry but have not yet researched what permits to get if we decide to do this. Right now were just trying to see if this is something we should be doing.