UK Royal Mint mining PCBs for precious metals in e-waste recovery effort The UK's Royal Mint has cut the ribbon on its Precious Metals Recovery factory, which extracts material from old Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). E-waste is a growing headache for the world and includes anything from end-of-life electronics to the contents of those boxes you can't bear to part with. According to the Royal Mint …
IIRC gold prices went up a lot at some point after the 70s, which prompted development of plating with a much thinner gold layer. That made recovery from more recent e-waste uneconomic. I guess now the economics have swung back with a higher gold price and also higher cost of non-recycling disposal.
Excir's contribution has been to develop a process avoiding cyanide, which is an environmental nightmare. However, from the limited descriptions I have seen it uses organic solvents and halogen acids, so not exactly nice. But TANSTAAFL, it's an inert metal so you've got to be brutal to get it out!
it uses organic solvents and halogen acids
Hydrochloric acid is a halogen acid produced by lots of living creatures, mostly as stomach acid. While not exactly nice, it isn't much of a problem.
I am more interested in those organic solvents. Processes I am familiar with use nitric acid, which isn't an organic solvent but also not really much of a problem to handle.
Bit more detail from yesterday's Graun.
"The factory in Llantrisant will use patented new chemistry – created by the Canadian clean technology firm Excir – to recover the gold. A washing machine-style spinning drum washes the pieces of circuitry containing gold in a special acid mix that dissolves the precious metal in four minutes. That compares with other gold extraction processes that are more energy intensive and tend to require extremely high temperatures over a longer period of time."
That compares with other gold extraction processes that are more energy intensive and tend to require extremely high temperatures over a longer period of time.
The processes I am familiar with (boiling diluted nitric acid and boiling aqua regia) require some energy and time, but I wouldn't call 110 C an extremely high temperature.
NB: That 110 C is just an estimate, but close enough.
>Welcome to the Living Language, where your language is defined by the vast majority of people who don't know how to speak it properly
Where this particular language is defined by the IUPAC committee on naming.
If we are now required to spell Sulfur with an F like some ignorant colonials - they can at least spell Aluminium properly (which they used to do until 1925 when somebody made a typo and refused to admit it)
While I understand the origins of IUPAC; Sulphur, Sulphuric Acid and Aluminium will always be spelled out in the British English, by any scientific paper I write.
If complainers see otherwise they can write the paper. Come back with something worth complaining about and I'll listen.
There is also a useful technique of writing a paper where you know things are wrong; inviting others to correct them. They are usually more than keen to "correct" your paper for you :-P
Even if it isn't profitable, it is still a good idea to process e-waste locally rather than sending it to the Third World where it will be processed by children at the cost of their healths. Exporting e-waste should be banned.
Which then brings the question of if its worth doing at all.
What a really good point.
Also the same applies to human effluent. Much better to just discharge it all directly into the rivers and sea. Much cheaper and easier. And means our private water companies could make much more in the way of profits. I like this style of thinking.
@AC
"Also the same applies to human effluent. Much better to just discharge it all directly into the rivers and sea. Much cheaper and easier. And means our private water companies could make much more in the way of profits. I like this style of thinking."
Interesting you say that after the amusing comments about the French seine river. Or that England monitors its waste output (which is why we know about it) unlike publicly owned Scottish water which doesnt monitor so much.
Our regulations and ability to measure increase but so does the cost of increased cleanup. While absolutely perfect water is desirable, the costs outweigh such desires.
@AC
"Sounds like someone has been reading a briefing on how to spin/excuse the disgusting state of Britain's waterways.
Just so you know: There is no excuse. This shit whataboutery will not wash. (Pun intended. )"
What excuse? Not Englands fault if Scotland mismanage their waterways and dont monitor it thoroughly. Nor that the French just held the Olympic games in water as bad or worse. I would assume the excuse is a need to invest more and I might be wrong but investment targets are set by the gov and met by the private companies.
You are complaining but I am not sure you understand the problem.
"Not Englands fault if Scotland mismanage their waterways and dont monitor it thoroughly. Nor that the French just held the Olympic games in water as bad or worse"
"Interesting trolling but sounds like that is your argument that you think English turds should be cleaner than anywhere else in the UK or even foreign. "
Nice try at deflecting, OBVIOUS TROLL, but you brought up England, Scotland and France, No one else.
No big, brown stoogie for you.
@AC
"you brought up England, Scotland and France, No one else."
Yes. Because assuming you are the same coward as started this conversation you said- 'Much better to just discharge it all directly into the rivers and sea. Much cheaper and easier. And means our private water companies could make much more in the way of profits'. So yes I brought up England, Scotland and France, and you seem to be malfunctioning. Your trolling seems to have fallen apart at the first hurdle.
Our regulations and ability to measure increase but so does the cost of increased cleanup. While absolutely perfect water is desirable, the costs outweigh such desires.
Which costs are you including in that?
The collapse of fisheries? No? Is there no economic cost to that? None at all?
How about illness and lost labour/productivity due to bacterial contamination?
Decline in farming/agricultural output due to ecosystem collapse, loss of pollinators, etc?
If you're not including at least some of those externalities in your calculation of "cost" then you're a shareholder at Thames Water and I claim my £5!
then you're a shareholder at Thames Water and I claim my £5!
Not even. Just some absolutist unfettered free-market zealot who thinks they will be able to scale great financial heights by spouting/parroting thd same old dogma. Not realising that these concepts are actually there to keep their likes down in their societal place whole the real wealthy squeeze them for every penny.
Recovering gold may be laudable and headline-generating, the simple reality is that if Britain wants to improve it's WEEE performance, then this stunt is not the answer. What is needed is to dramatically improve on the dismal circa 50% recycling rate for WEEE, and to get 90% of the recovered materials recycled, rather than worrying about an element that comprises fractions of a percent of the total product weight.
A big part of the problem is that governments of both colours pushed responsibility for recycling back onto retailers; That was conceptually a super idea by out of touch policy makers that laid the cost at the door of business. In practice it was a wretchedly crap idea because retailers are people who sell and distribute stuff, not waste collectors. It resulted in fragmented and confusing options for consumers, and higher costs for business, and remarkably it's got systematically worse through the (so far) six waves of the Distributor Take-back Scheme (DTS). The public sector last-ditch offer of "take it to the municipal tip" is convenient only for people with ready access to a tip and a car to get there - inevitably leading to the tradition of leaving stuff out on the kerb for the "mobile recycling fairies" who strip the steel and either burn or fly tip the rest.
The correct answer was always and still is to have the public sector offer an integrated WEEE and waste battery management scheme (optionally contracted out to a suitable private sector specialist) that is incredibly easy for consumers to understand and access. By all means pass the costs back to businesses who sell stuff, but unless the scheme is easy to communicate, easy to use, and free at point of use then we'll never properly manage WEEE and battery waste.
But hey, much easier to issue a press release about recovering trivial amounts of gold by a "company" that's part of government.
"What is needed is to dramatically improve on the dismal circa 50% recycling rate for WEEE, and to get 90% of the recovered materials recycled, rather than worrying about an element that comprises fractions of a percent of the total product weight."
You're right. But it's a start. The article did also mention some other metals also being recovered. The BBC article I first saw went into a bit more depth were they describe the circuit board being heated first to move all/most of the components first, separating through filter screens (although they didn't go into detail on why they do that) and were in talks/discussions on what to do with/how to use the old circuit boards. The El Reg article does seem to come across as being a re-write of a press release and some important bits got left out. That seems unusual for El Reg, but not unheard of.
"As well as recovering gold, the company is also looking at what to do with all of the other materials that it is separating out from the circuit boards.
They contain a number of different materials including aluminium, copper, tin and steel. They’re also investigating whether ground up boards could be used by the construction industry."
So, they are looking at recycling as much as possible, not just a "stunt" to get the gold. If it works, then it becomes a model for others to copy, especially if it's far less energy intensive than current methods and hopefully using chemicals that can also be reused/recycled internally to the process. Oh, and despite the Tim Worstal article linked above by a poster, it's not specifically mobile phones they are recycling. I'd expect them to be taking WEEE in by the container load from factories, WEEE processors or Council tips, so the economics of transports probably does add up, at least in comparison to shipping it abroad where it most likely either gets landfilled or only the most easy/valuable stuff is recycled.
@rg287
"If you're not including at least some of those externalities in your calculation of "cost" then you're a shareholder at Thames Water and I claim my £5!"
If I remember right the UK regulators set the investment targets and the companies (England) typically meet them. Scotland doesnt monitor their water so well. This seems to be what the voters care about. Should the people care they could pressure regulators to increase the price of water and increase investment targets
If I remember right the UK regulators set the investment targets and the companies (England) typically meet them. Scotland doesnt monitor their water so well. This seems to be what the voters care about. Should the people care they could pressure regulators to increase the price of water and increase investment targets
Given that these companies are borrowing, and then paying out non-trivial sums in dividends (servicing that debt then falls back on the ratepayers), we could maybe just nationalise the lot and do away with the funny accounting. Set an investment target, make those investments and not have to worry and expend all this effort in cooking the books so dividends can be paid. This would keep the price of water steady, or we could even continue with that borrowing but(!) use it for further investment! All for the same cost as we do now!
@rg287
"Given that these companies are borrowing, and then paying out non-trivial sums in dividends (servicing that debt then falls back on the ratepayers), we could maybe just nationalise the lot and do away with the funny accounting"
You would think except the government borrows and runs it badly (see the lack of monitoring in Scotland). The last time UK water was compared, the more state run the worse the quality and price of the water was. Apparently that was around 10 years ago.
"Set an investment target, make those investments and not have to worry and expend all this effort in cooking the books so dividends can be paid."
Which sounds like how government runs things. They proclaim they will invest in such and such, pay off their friends and cook the books to remove public sector work from public sector book keeping.
"This would keep the price of water steady, or we could even continue with that borrowing but(!) use it for further investment! All for the same cost as we do now!"
The price of water is regulated. Investment targets from the regulator. There is even less of that control in government hands and it costs more.
>Which then brings the question of if its worth doing at all. I dont know the answer but could reasonably be to not bother
Depends how much of the hidden costs you count.
Worth running the process to extract the value of gold = no
Worth it to reduce the amount of heavy metal waste going into landfill = yes
Worth it considering the amount of toxic waste solvents generated by the process = someone should check
There was a big deal about "mining" slag heaps for rare-earths with some interesting solvent mixtures. But the result was a small amount of rare-earths and a mountain sized slag heap now saturated with toxic solvents that had to be disposed of somehow.
@Yet Another Anonymous coward
"Depends how much of the hidden costs you count."
This goes both ways. The costs of not trying to somehow economically collect all this waste from all over Britain to collect what little gold is in there and probably try to mark up jewellery enough to compensate for some of the costs. If that can be done then great, but the hidden costs of collection, transport and so on should also be counted.
And then there is the disposal of the left over waste. I hope it is worth doing but we will see
Presumably if it were economically viable then commercial interests would already be doing it, rather than a government owned company.
The commercial interests aren't generally held responsible for the EOL waste/pollution externalities of their products. The government are (via the NHS, public waste management and other obligations).
Make them responsible and they might find it is suddenly worth doing.
What's sometimes easier though is for the government to make them responsible via taxation and then just do it on a centralised/national basis (per this).
"The commercial interests aren't generally held responsible for the EOL waste/pollution externalities of their products. The government are (via the NHS, public waste management and other obligations)."
I'm guessing you don't work in the enforcement of some of said regulations. I do. You can choose not to believe me, but the same rules apply to private companies as public sector organisations. If anything some large elements of the public sector gets a cushy ride (eg disposal of defence materials, or the chemically contaminated waste-to-sewer of hospitals).
All very well saying make the retailer collect the waste, and pay for its recycling that'll make them responsible, but that's essentially the current approach for WEEE. It's a fairly normal government answer - the same thinking that led to the smart meters fiasco (worked on that a tiny bit), or the infamous green deal (I worked on that too!).
Let's ask who is really responsible for e-waste? The makers are simply meeting demand. Retailers act to get the product to the people who want it. Customers, they pay for it, they create the demand, they purchase it, and they throw it out when it suits them. So who's responsible? Clearly customers, they're the ones end-of-lifeing stuff they bought and used. We can't expect customers to dismantle their old kit and send the materials back to processors, what we can and should do is treat it like all other household waste, where there's some minimal sorting, but local authorities take it away and recycle or dispose.
I don't think it's as simple has "blame the consumer for throwing it away" either. Even the article mentioned the "right to repair". A lot of tat is built with no intention of it being repairable by anyone in a reasonable manner. Yes, of course, no one expects all consumers to be handy with a soldering iron and to repair everything, but where did all the electricla repair shops go that used to be on every high street? Most went out of business for two main reasons. Items simply not being economically repairable and items changing every year with new models coming out incompatible with old models so parts, even if available, always had to be bought in because you simply can't stock everything for an ever changing target.
And, of course, it's even more complex than that with surface mount electronics, only whole modules as spares, and probably many other reasons too. Even the fashion and marketing industries can shoulder some of the blame. Got a new kitchen? It's blue? Have to replace all those red gadgets that matched the old kitchen with blue ones! Oh, are you still using last years model? Why not get the latest model, it's exactly the same but newer and has go-faster stripes!
I'm guessing you don't work in the enforcement of some of said regulations. I do. You can choose not to believe me, but the same rules apply to private companies as public sector organisations.
I think you've taken an excessively literal reading of my post. Yes, public sector sometimes gets a cushy ride. Private sector have also historically had a very cushy ride (c.f. 300years of toxic waste in East London which the Govenment paid to sort out when building the Olympic Park because the private sector wouldn't touch it, or the allotments near me which are full of leather offcuts from the former shoe factory if you dig hard enough! Although the latter worked out alright because developers decided they didn't want it when the council tried to flog it off a few years back).
But the fact is, that commercial decisions are ultimately backstopped by government. They are the fixer of last resort. e.g. Businesses moved to plastics, it's the government picking up plastic wastes. That's changed now via hard and soft regulation (e.g. carrier bag charges nudging consumer demand), and everyone's moving back to paper and biodegradeables wherever possible. But society bears the economic and environmental costs of microplastics, and all the other damage done in the interim. Nobody is going back and billing brewers for the environmental cost of plastic rings, or supermarkets for the billions of plastic bags they handed out. It's government that ends up clearing waterways, remediating pollution, etc.
I was responding to this line:
Presumably if it were economically viable then commercial interests would already be doing it, rather than a government owned company.
The government can (and should) make a much broader value assessment of doing this. A commercial interest only needs to gather the feedstock, process it, and sell the output at a profit. The government also gets to consider "what's the cost of sending the material to landfill instead? What's the geopolitical availability of virgin material? Is it a good idea to have a bit of domestic availability via recycling to diversify supply chain?". This is a much broader calculation than a single-purpose commercial recycling entity would do. The commercial entity doesn't care what the cost would be for a council to send e-waste to landfill. They only care if they can sell the gold for more than it cost to acquire and process.
It would be naive and short-sighted to judge the Llantrisant plant simply by "does it sell the output for more than the input costs". Thoe externalities can and should be included.
We can't expect customers to dismantle their old kit and send the materials back to processors, what we can and should do is treat it like all other household waste, where there's some minimal sorting, but local authorities take it away and recycle or dispose.
So what's the problem then? People seem to be whinging about how hard it might be to gather the feedstock and transport it to Llantrisant.
But clearly it's easy - dedicated e-waste skip at local recycling centres, and it gets aggregated and sent to this plant.
If you're going to say:
If that can be done then great, but the hidden costs of collection, transport and so on should also be counted.
Then I'm going to ask "What is the hidden cost of collection, transport and so on for taking that rubbish to landfill?".
If the government can pay for one through taxes, then they can pay for the other too! This is a solved problem. And not everything has to be about the final £. Dumping e-waste into landfill has a long-term cost. If people want to count the transport costs, then that's fine. But they can't stop there. They also need to count the costs of rare earths leeching into landfill, and of strip-mining virgin material.
it is still a good idea to process e-waste locally rather than sending it to the Third World where it will be processed by children at the cost of their healths.
Yes, what Tim's note at ASI (oh dear, is he really running with the Tufton Street crowd these days?) fully ignores is that pesky word "externality". His view is purely constrained to "how much does it cost to get feedstock into the factory and then how much can you make out of it?". He ignores entirely the economic-environmental cost of mining virgin material, or dumping e-waste as landfill if recycling "isn't economic".
If recycling is uneconomic because virgin material is cheaper, then it simply means virgin material should be taxed higher.
This is not a manipulation of the free markets, whatever the drongos in SW1P claim. Smith and Hayek1 alike were open to the notion of externalities and considering the full lifecycle costs of a material. If virgin stock is cheap but you poison a load of people with heavy metal contamination from leaky landfill, then the economic "benefit" of the cheap virgin stock is a false economy. Sure, the individual company does well. The shareholders are very happy. But the overall economic effect is negative.
And that's without having to get into niggly, subjective matters like "morals" and societal cost.
Exporting e-waste should be banned.
To a point. We all know from the discussions around silicon manufacturing that the cry of "why can't we make everything at home?" is answered by simple economies of scale and the huge capital costs for some of this stuff - even Taiwan are only capable of the actual manufacturing process of chips, reliant as they are on ASML in Europe (and their US suppliers) for photolith gear, on Japanese suppliers for silicon wafers (made in turn from sand mined in just two locations in the north-east United States), on various countries for ultra-pure Nobel gases (Ukraine was/is a significant supplier).
So we shouldn't object to the export of e-waste for particular types if another country has the right facilities for it - just as we could (should?) import feedstock for the plant at Llantrisant. This is Smith's pins and specialisation of labour at work, alongside Ricardo's comparative advantage.
But yes, any export must only be to bona fide plants that meet the same standards we would require in the UK. It is abhorrent to be shipping it out to SE Asia on the basis of nebulous promises that it will be properly handeld (and then either dumped or picked apart by kids).
1. That's the bit Mrs Thatcher and her gang always glossed over. Hayek was a staunch advocate of free markets - but he labours the point in Chapters 2&3 of Road to Serfdom (Thatcher's bible) that free markets require protection via strong regulation to remain free. He rejected laissez faire entirely (having seen where it led the US prior to trust-busting of the 1890s). If Hayek had his way, a fair few "leaders of industry" would have been banned as company directors for market manipulation and price fixing over the last 30 years (if not imprisoned) - Lord Bamford, Bill Gates (too many to mention!), not to mention the CEOs of various supermarkets & dairies, or the likes of Balfour Beatty, Kier and the late (unlamented) Carillion. And those are just the ones we know about! Traitors of capitalism - enriching themselves at the expense of competition and innovation. He would be aghast at the very existence of companies the size of Google or Microsoft.
Depends on your definitions, but there's estimates published by UK government agencies (eg HSE) of around 2m tonnes a year of waste electronic and electrical equipment. So that's from all sources private, commercial and government. It's also gross weight, throw out your washing machine and the circa 15 kilos of concrete counterweight is part of that e-waste, along with all the glass and plastic parts.
Regarding the 62m tonnes globally, maybe the the UK does really generates a thirtieth of all WEEE on the planet, I'm inclined to doubt that - I suspect that comes back to some countries being far worse at measuring their waste, or using different definitions.
Just checked some numbers: So they are saying they can extract up to 100 grams of gold from one ton of computer trash. Obviously only if someone put that 100 grams in first :-) For gold ore, 10 grams per ton is considered quite good. You just need to find materials that actually contain that amount of gold. And 100 grams per ton makes one ton worth about £7,000. Aluminium is only about £2,000 per ton. If you have raw materials with that amount of gold, you will likely find a better offer.
Why don't they just send the whole lot to an existing gold mine and process the boards through the ore processing depending on the ore body that is being mined those are used to different mixed metals and can extract things like copper, lead, bismuth, silver, gold etc.
In fact if the boards were ground up fine enough they could use a shaker table to stream the different metals by the densities. No to minimal chemicals required.
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