Urban Mining In Your Home

I found an interesting article entitled

How to mine precious metals in your home

Below is an excerpt that I found interesting, might have to look into how to reclaim Cobalt :-)


From one tonne of mobile phone batteries, Umicore claims it can extract between 135-240kg of cobalt, depending on the generation of phone – modern smartphones have more. They say they can also reclaim 70kg of copper and 15kg of lithium from the same handsets. Even once the battery has been removed, the electronics inside a phone can surrender around 1kg of silver and 235g of gold per tonne of devices. This compares very favourably to primary mining, which only averages 100g of silver in each tonne of mined ore, and 2-5g of gold per tonne of ore.

Full Article Here... 

Reasons why "Urban Mining" rocks.

What is Urban Mining?

The electronics industry is now competitive with both the religious world and the jeweler for gold. It takes only forty cell phones to use up one gram of the stuff. But, it takes a ton of mined ore to produce that gram.

“Urban mining” is the picking of valuable minerals and metals out of discarded electronics. Though recycling is only beginning to catch on in many places, a metric ton of recycled laptop circuit boards can yield 40 to 800 times as much gold as the ore.


    For every 1 million cell phones that are recycled, the following amounts of precious metals can be recovered:

    16,000 kg of copper

    350 kg of silver

    34 kg of gold

    15 kg of palladium
    Benedette Cuffari, “Extracting Gold from E-Waste” at AZO Cleantech (October 26 2017) 

Currently, we use heat to burn out the metals, or chemicals to leach out the metals, both are effective but toxic.  A company in America has developed a method using water with some additives, and electrolysis to separate valuable metals.  It will be interesting if this process becomes public, urban miming might just take off... :-)

If anyone knows of any other methods, I'd love to hear about it in the comments section below.  Have a great day :-)

 

higher precious metal recovery

eWaste is always an interesting area for "Urban Miners"

There are two dominant approaches to recycling today’s used electronics – one is de-manufacturing, which is manually dismantling the electronics in order to utilize the raw materials that are found for recycling and the other is shredding, where the electronics are loaded into large shredders which helps to reduce manual sorting and separation of components.

“Metals have been recycled for thousands of years, but in the last 50 years or so, we’ve seen some interesting developments, particularly in fields using granulation methods to pull out more metals with less effort,” Gregory said.

Some newer methods, such as the ones used by Liquisort, will actually process these metals in a special bath. Located in the Netherlands, Liquisort specializes in the separation of nonferrous metals by using a sustainable, innovated and patented sorting method that makes it possible to sort various metals into clean, separated fractions.  “Liquisort’s bath separates metals with dense water and magnet systems to better the purity of metals.

Read more here 

Urban Mining: Hidden Riches in our Suburbs.

Cities hold tons of materials that can be reused — and doing so can address over-exploitation of scarce natural resources. From buildings to electronic waste, we are surrounded by value. So how does urban mining work?

 
With demand of natural resources increasing and supply decreasing, the use of recycled materials is gaining importance. 

Mineral resources like , bricks or ceramics can be found in large quantities in many buildings across countries like Germany. Metals such as steel, copper, and aluminum, and materials like plastic, gypsum, asphalt and wood are also abundant. Household waste is also a major source of valuable materials
.
Urban mining has many advantages over the materials are already in the city where they are likely to be needed again, so there is no need for long transport routes. And the environmental impact, particularly in land use, is clearly lower than mining for natural resources.

Just about everything can be reused

Buildings, furniture, electrical appliances and old radiators are just as much part of industrial society's "anthropogenic deposits" as disused railways, industrial wastelands, underground cables or that  forgotten in the depths of your drawer.

These so-called secondary raw materials can be reused for commercial and industrial production, thus limiting imports from abroad, protecting natural resources and the environment.

For recycling experts, a simple car represents a large manmade stock of raw materials; even a rusty old car has value. The Internet is full of retailers looking for gears, doors and other replacement parts. The iron, plastic, glass and metal can all be sold to make new products. Tires can be processed into road surfaces or insulating material.

In Summary, there is A FORTUNE to be made in waste :-)

I've got some Metal recycling suggestions and tips listed at Life is an Adventure if you're interested :-) Might get some ideas flowing :-)

 “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”

― Edward Everett Hale