Smelting E-Waste For Gold, Silver, Copper

hey guys my name is jason with mount baker mining  and metals and on today's video we're going to be   working again with our pcb electronic scrap  off our shaker table and we're going to do   some experiments trying to figure out the best  way to recover the copper gold silver and other   precious metals so this again is the stuff we're  going to be working with we'll probably work with   the number one today this is just the number one  concentrates off our shaker table after we ground   up all the electronic scrap and so i'm going  to do a couple different experiments the first   one is going to be taking this stuff adding a  little bit of sulfur about five percent by weight   in with some flux smelting it down and trying to  keep all the copper and the other uh base metals   as in metallic form and make an alloy that  we can then look at uh electro winning away all right so to start out with here  we're going to start with the number ones   i'm going to add a fairly small amount of material  here so i can run several experiments if i have to   i'm going to start with about 200  grams of the number one concentrate so there we go there's there's 200 grams right there that's what 200 grams looks  like so we'll put that in our bin here   now i'm going to use i'm going to  treat this just like i do with our gold concentrates the whole goal is to absorb primarily the iron but any of the other more reactive  base metals such as zinc and aluminum   get the sulfur to react with that and  pull it out of the system as a sulfide   now one of the things and i'm hoping you guys can  help me out with this is there's something called   the metal reactivity series and essentially talks  about how reactive each metal is and so you have   gold is very non-reactive so it's somewhere  at the top of the chart and then as you go   down the chart you get copper and lead and  iron and aluminum and zinc as you go down   and that's for oxidizing metals or the reactivity  chart but one of the things that i'm interested   and maybe you guys can help me out with this  is is there a chart somewhere that talks about   metals affinity for sulfur because copper  has a very high affinity for sulfur iron also has a high affinity for sulfur but  on one of my last experiments i i added a huge   amount of sulfur and i got a button that was  mostly tin so it tells me that tin has a very   very low affinity for sulfur even though  it's below copper on the reactivity series   so if anybody out there has any information on the   reactivity of metals with sulfur or a chart  i would very much appreciate that information for our flux today we're going to use 100  grams of soda ash and about 25 grams of silica   mix it in there with our stuff so we'll get that all mixed up because i  added 200 grams of concentrates i'm gonna   add 10 grams of sulfur and this is something  i just picked up at the hardware store it's   a fungicide apparently it was in like the uh  fertilizer department and the hardware store   so i'm gonna add like i said  about 10 grams or so of sulfur and that should eat up all that iron and aluminum  and zinc and the junk in there we don't want mix that around now one thing i have found about the flux is in the past i've used lye instead  of soda ash and i found that i got bigger beads   when i use soda ash instead of lye so i'm back  to soda ash i've also used borax in the past   but i found that with the  fire clay crucibles that i use if i add silica instead of borax it  makes the crucibles last a lot longer   and so kind of the my flux of choice at this  point is about 75 or 80 percent soda ash and 20 to 25 silica it makes your crucibles  last a long time it keeps the flux really basic   and helps absorb the hopefully iron sulfide that  we're gonna make here because we smelt this down okay so there's our here's our charge i'm going to  get that in a crucible i'm going to add a bunch of   iron nails to it for an irso iron source and so  the the nails are going to be able to take any   copper sulfide or lead sulfide or any other you  know base metal sulfide that we make and hopefully   take those base metal sulfides reduce them back to  copper or lead and create iron sulfide and you can   see how that works using the metal reactivity  series um but the idea is is that we're going   to have a metal alloy that's mostly copper with a  little bit of tin and gold and lead and the sulfur   iron sulfide that we make will be absorbed  by our basic slag which is mostly soda ash so i'm just gonna this is just a fire  clay crucible i'm gonna add our charge i'm gonna take several eight penny nails  these are bright nails they're not galvanized   here's four i don't know six seven eight  we'll add eight nails in there for the iron now let's get this in our furnace and  we'll get it heated up and smelt it down so so all right here's our first  run with 10 grams of sulfur there you go there's our  bead of metal like we wanted and it doesn't look like there's any  sulfides in there so our our slag   absorbed all our sulfides they'd be right here if  there was a little mat layer which there is not   so that worked pretty well we got all our  metal out and a nice looking copper cone here   let me get this part weighed and figure  out how much we had we started with about   200 grams another interesting thing here is i  pulled the nails out you can see the nails are   quite a bit smaller than they were  they're kind of welded together too   but i wanted to weigh the nails and figure out  how much iron we used up well i'm going to upgrade   my scale here this little spring scale is kind of  going south on me so i stole this from my wife and   uh she wasn't too happy about it but  i told her just to go buy another one   what's the what's the craziest or weirdest thing  you guys have ever stole from your wife huh   leave me a comment in the comment section let me  know so far mine's the scale out of the kitchen   so here's our nails our used nails weigh  about 15 grams there's all eight of them there now here's eight brand new nails and this way 34 grams so we used up more than half the iron  in these things in our little experiment so that   worked out pretty good no matte layer all metal  all slag so that worked out really really good so there's a bunch of bubbles there that's kind of interesting all right and there's our block get it  wait here we started with about 200 grams   ended up with about 150 and that squares with  the last time we did this experiment um i ended   up with about 75 weight by metal um and you can  see this stuff is just all i mean it's rusted and   oxidized and some of the stuff so when you put  in 200 grams probably a lot of the oxides went   into the slag and then we probably removed some of  the other base metals with the iron and the sulfur   but there you go so now hopefully we've got mostly  copper in here precious metals a little bit other   base metals that we didn't uh get sulfidized i  guess um and so we can we can take this now pour   it into anodes and electro in the copper away  get the copper as a sealable product and then   in the slimes or the sludge we can get the  precious metals and some of the other base   metals and refine those out and we will be able to  100 process our pcb metals so that's pretty cool   all right so now what we're going to do is  we're going to take 200 grams of the number one   concentrates mix it with the same flux recipe that  100 grams of soda and 20 25 grams of silica or so   uh and then i'm gonna add about a  hundred maybe 125 grams of sulfur   i'm going to try and sulfidize all the base  metals in here see if i can get as much of the   copper and the iron and the lead and everything  to turn into sulfides and that'll leave us with   a little tiny bead at the bottom that should  be where almost all of our precious metals are   and then we can try and recover the precious  metals out of that and then once we have all   our sulfides then we can uh take those and  reduce them using iron back into base metals   now i'm not going to use any iron and this one  because we don't want to reduce anything yet   we want to get all of the metals that  don't react with sulfur down to the bottom so okay well we'll see how this works out this  is the stuff we added all that sulfur to   to try and get all the base metals out of the way so in theory this should be a bunch  of sulfides mostly copper sulfides   with a little bit of metal cone at  the top there let's see what we got well we got all sulfides all sulfides with  just a very very thin little mat layer on top and absolutely no metal in the bottom  so that didn't work very well what i'm   going to have to do is add a little bit  i'll have to add a little bit of iron   to that so we can reduce a little bit of metal to  act as a collector metal for the precious metals   okay what we're going to do is i've got my  sulfides in there i'm going to add one single nail   which weighs 5 grams and we'll re-smelt  that and see if we get a little button   of metal at the bottom since we will have  reduced a little bit of the base metals   that's my working theory right now see how it goes all right well here is our pour  with the one nail the five grams hopefully there will be a little bead  of metal right up here see what we got nothing well no that's not true there is  a little bit of metal there see right there might be a little bit  hard to tell the difference between   the sulfides in the metal but there is a little  metal button right at the bottom of the cone so that's what we were looking for and  my hope is is that this is captured most of the precious metals in  our 200 grams worth of sample so i'm going to take this  mix it with some lead and   cue pellet in our compelling furnace and  see if there's any precious metals in here and then what i'm gonna do yeah there's there's a little more  metal there let's see if i can get this all at the same time here yeah maybe not much okay anyway what we're  going to do is we're going to take our   sulfides here and now i'm just going to  mix a whole bunch of nails in here like   i don't know we started with 200 grams of stuff  so i'll mix like 150 or 200 grams of nails in here   we'll smelt this down and we should end up with  a cone that looks something like our copper cone   from our first melt and the theory with this  whole this whole experiment is if you can get   the precious metals out early take the sulfides  reprocess them to get the copper out then you   have you don't have to go through the electro  winning process here to get your precious metals   so let's try it and then here's what it  looks like i just broke it open there's   all our sulfides and a little thin layer of  glassy slag on top which is kind of interesting so what i'm going to do is i'm going to mix our 100 maybe more maybe 200 grams i'll do 200 grams  of soda ash and about 50 grams of silica   and all of our all of our iron see if  we can reduce a bunch of this to metal   so another interesting thing here just kind of an  observation i mixed 100 grams of soda ash in here   i think that's what i remember and 25 grams of  silica and we're left with hardly any slag on top   compared to like our very first run when i have  the sulfur uh and reduced all the the base metals   so there's a very thin little layer here and  it's very very glassy and i don't know if you   saw in the video but when i poured this there  was like some really thick slag that came out   and i'm wondering if these sulfides have somehow  absorbed all the soda ash and this little thin   layer of slag on top is mostly that silica  sand because there's just hardly any of it   left so i don't know what do you guys think  that's just kind of an observation that i had   where'd all my slide go it must be it must  be somehow that that sodium oxide must be   somehow absorbed into this matte phase and the  silica sand is left here on top anyway some i   thought i'd bring up all right here's our mixed up  stuff let's see we can get it all to fit in here   film and pour and do all this same time here  all right we go put that back in the furnace   and look at that jumbled mess there we'll melt  all that down and turn in a nice beautiful copper so all right guys lots to cover here so this to  review this is the one where uh we were trying   to reduce the base metals after we had sulfidized  everything and we got our copper block here   and it weighs just under 100 grams about 93 grams  so uh we're missing about 55 grams of material   that we recovered when we did our first smell with  just a little bit of sulfur over here this block   so when i cracked this thing open there was a  matte layer here's the top of the mold or the   slag so you can see kind of the slag layer here  and then this is the matte layer so this is   the base metals that didn't get reduced  from the iron there could still be some   copper in there i'm not sure i'm not sure  what this bit what this matte layer is   um but i'm assuming there's still some some  metals in there that we would want to recover   so what essentially what i'm saying is i  don't think this is a very good method but   to continue on here these are the nails the nails  weighed out at about 90 grams i added 350 grams   worth of nails so we used up a bunch of iron in  the process so that worked uh and then here is the   cupel that we used get some tweezers here and  this is the little tiny bead we got out of   uh we had one i think it was 1.3  grams of metal and this bead weighs 0.0 grams and it's very silvery so i expect it to  be mostly silver so that didn't work out very well   either the if i was going to do it again i'd add  three or four nails and try and get you know 10   grams of material uh as to act as a collector for  the precious metals uh this was a good experiment   i think it it was worth trying but i think in the  long run or if you're gonna scale up this probably   isn't a good way to proceed for a couple reasons  one it doesn't really do you any good to get out   the precious metals if you're gonna process this  by electro winning you're gonna do it anyway so   there's no reason to do an extra step or two just  to get the precious metals out earlier and using   the the iron reduction method we still have some  base metals in here probably quite a bit of copper   that we can't recover and that's that's a lot  of value of our of our stuff so uh it was a good   experiment but i don't think this is the way to go  in the future i'm much i'm a lot more interested   in the adding a little bit of sulfur getting a  huge block of metal and then electro wing it away   what i want to do now is i really like what we did  here with a little bit of sulfur in the iron and   we got a a nice metallic block so now i'm going  to increase the the volume and we're going to use   a number 12 crucible here and instead of doing 200  grams i'm going to do 2 000 grams uh with the same   proportions of flux and sulfur so let me get a  batch mixed up here and i'll tell you what i did all right well let's hope this works so i put 2  000 grams of number one concentrates i had 800   grams of soda ash which is a little bit less than  we used last time but that's what i had so i had   800 grams of soda ash in here 200 grams of silica  sand 200 grams of sulfur and 350 grams of nails   so let's put it in our furnace and hopefully we're  looking for about 1.5 uh let's see 1500 grams of   that stuff block of metal so if our math  all works out we should end up with about   1500 grams worth of metal that  we can then uh play around with uh all right here we go it's still pretty  hot but i'm impatient and losing daylight whoa that was cool that was pretty neat i'm gonna let that cool down a little  bit more before i start hammering on it   but we obviously got a bunch of metal there well i'm waiting for that to cool down  let me check out our nail situation so here's our nails uh i think i don't know if  i said it on camera i think i put in 350 grams   earlier at the beginning and this weighs about 290  grams so we didn't use that much iron this this   iron that i put in so there may have been plenty  of iron in there that was used up with the sulfur   uh and we didn't uh we didn't need as much of  this stuff or there may be a matte layer here um   but that's that actually shouldn't be the case  because i left that in a long time and it didn't   use up any of the iron so um we'll see we'll see  what happens when i break this open but it was   surprising how little iron we actually used  all right let's see what we got gooey or not hey that worked out good hot butt nice and  clean we got here for in the middle it's all   hissing and popping it looks it looks good  to me nice slag no matt no matte layer there and all metal yeah that looks nice all right got this  thing cooled off here get a weight on her look at there 1500 grams i want to melt my scale  my my wife's scale but 1500 grams we put in 2   000 got 75 which is exactly what we did with our  previous experiments so that scaled up very nicely okay well now what i want to do is cast  all the metal we've gotten out of our pcbs   into an anode bar and so this is all the stuff  that i've done in the past this is the little   tin thing i got an earlier video this is  the one where i pulled the magnetics out   but this is all the stuff that's more or less  right from the right right out of the trays here   this one i'm not going to use this is the one  that i imported with all that lead and i don't   want to i don't want to screw around with all  that lead it's just it's really hard when you   have that much lead for electro winning and stuff  you really want to keep as much copper as you can   so i'm going to set that one aside and we'll get  all these put back in a crucible i'm going to melt   them down without any flux and i'm going to pour  them into a bar that we can then electro win away so all right guys well one more experiment i  sit out here and i think and i think and   i've got one more thing i want to  try i've mixed up another batch here   this has a hundred grams of the number one  concentrates 100 grams of soda ash 20 grams of   silica sand and i've added 75 grams of  copper oxide it's this stuff right here   and my theory is using the metal reactivity series  that if i add a bunch of copper oxide to this   when it gets hot if a copper oxide  molecule touches a piece of iron   it oxidizes the iron and reduces the copper  because copper really doesn't want to be   oxidized and iron is much more reactive same with  lead same with tin pretty much anything below   copper on the electr the reactivity series should  be oxidized and the copper oxide reduced to copper   so that way we could get pretty much a pure copper  anode with just the precious metals and we would   have the lead and the tin and the nickel and  the other base metals that go into the slag   that if we wanted to recover them later we could  recover them uh with another method but if if this   works this might be a good way just to mix a bunch  of copper oxide with the number one concentrates   some slag or some flux and smelt it down and get  a nice clean copper anode with precious metals all right guys well just judging from the  poor that copper oxide didn't work very well and somebody tell me why i don't understand why it  didn't work because the copper oxide should be uh   really want to reduce to copper metal and  there was iron and lead and tin in there   and those are lower on the reactivity  series so why didn't the copper oxide   turn into copper and oxidize with those metal  other metals because it looks like when the copper   oxide and the slag touch the iron of the  cone mold it reduced out you see the red   in there you can see it kind of you  know there i think that's the copper   coming out and reducing the iron so  why didn't it work in the smelt i   need a chemistry buff to help me out let's see  what we got here we'll break this open though i had to add about 50 grams of borax as well whoa where'd our metal go what in the world oh there's a there's a little  there's a little bit of metal there what in the heck happened where did all of our   where'd all our metal go why are we just left  with this little tiny turd looking thing here okay what happened help me out youtube i need  a chemistry buff to tell me what's going on   here i added 100 grams of concentrates and i'm  left with this little thing that's i don't know   maybe maybe 25 grams let me cool it off and see  but it's all chunky and it just looks horrible well here it is it's all red and kind of chunky   what does it weigh 20 26 grams  so where'd all our metal go youtube what happened i got i got this i got this  junk kind of glassy slag i didn't add any sulfur   i didn't add any iron i didn't i didn't it was  just the number one cons some copper oxide and   some flux what did that copper oxide do all right  guys well we covered a lot of ground again today   uh unfortunately some of our experiments didn't  work the idea of adding a bunch of sulfur and   sulfidizing essentially all that stuff did not  work we couldn't recover the precious metals out   a little bit that we were covered and then we  couldn't convert them all back into base metals   uh so that that didn't work i'm just gonna throw  that one out the window uh the copper oxide   still baffles me i cannot figure out what happened  there so you guys help me out on that one and also   if anybody can again give me a chart or a graph  or something that shows me the reactivity of   different metals to sulfur that would be a big  help but what did work is adding a little bit of   sulfur to our uh number one concentrates smelting  down with iron and i made a anode this is a just   a thin piece we pour it into our our bar mold  there and that seems to work pretty good the iron   reduces the base metals apparently the iron oxide  or the iron sulfide gets absorbed up into the slag   so there's no mat layer the sulfur goes away as  iron sulfide into the slag and we get our metal   that we can pour into a bar an anode and then  we can get that electro wind away to pure copper   process the slimes and get our precious metals  so if you guys have any advice please let me know   leave me a comment or send me an email otherwise  i hope you enjoyed the video thanks for watching

Channel: mbmmllc

Views: 257,518

Keywords: circuit board recycling, computer recycling, electronic scrap, electronic scrap gold, electronic waste, electronics for gold, electronics recycling, e-waste recycling, gold from electronics, gold in circuit boards, gold recovery, ic chips, metal separation process, pcb, pcb gold, pcb recycling, pcbs, precious metals, printed circuit board recycling, scrap gold from electronics, scrapping circuit boards, scrapping computers, urban gold mining, urban mining

Id: -v4MaMjP59Q

Length: 40min 32sec (2432 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021