Scrap gold from electronics, effect on the price if it's cheaper to recover?

[Vai]

One of my favourite news sites is Ars Technica, as I'm a massive technology fan. When I went on there earlier I saw this article about a possible new technique for recovering gold from scrap electronics: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/new-polymer-easily-captures-gold-extracted-from-e-waste/

 

What kind of impact do you think this might have on gold prices if it becomes a common industrial technique? Is the amount of gold heading to landfill currently enough to depress prices if it's recovered or is the gold price more driven by socio-economic impacts than supply and demand?

[Martlet]

I dont believe much gold is going to landfill in UK and Europe these days. Electronic and electrical gear has to be deposed of through processing plants that strip anything and everything, gold is recovered. 

[Midasfrog]

There is a Youtube video about stripping gold from electronic boards the cost of the chemicals used was more than the value of the gold recovered . Plus the chemicals are not very pleasant to handle. 

[Tattoedamat]

I've looked into it in the past and the only way of doing it and making money is in s massive industrial scale

[Pohaku]

I would be extremely surprised if the quantity of gold that would now be 'financially viable to recover' would be sufficient to move the price. 

It's a fair question, half your responses are from people missing the point - if it now becomes easy and cheap to get the gold out of the scrap, does that have an affect on how much actually gets recovered (and therefore overall supply, and therefore price).

[Robb]

Gold has very little intrinsic value.  By far (over 75%) of gold is used to make bracelets and other jewelry or to mint coins and bullion.  Nothing special about those two markets at all.  There isn't a lot of gold that is "essential". 

Only about 9 precent of the gold is used in production of electronics.  I think the entire industrial sector of gold amounts to only about 16 percent of production.

Copper by contrast is almost 100 percent utilized by various industrial sectors and can be considered to have true intrinsic value.

Given the limited uses of gold as an industrial metal and the amount already sitting above ground, I don't think recycling from scrap is economical at this time.

Note that scrap high grade electronics are some of the richest gold ore on the planet.  Eventually someone will probably figure out a way to extract it without all the dire health and environmental risks associated with the current processes .

If the price per troy oz stays under $2,000 USD then it might take decades , if the price is $5,000 oz it might make sense  to start extracting from scrap tomorrow.  Who knows?  It is all a gamble.

 

 

 

[HawkHybrid]

5 hours ago, Pohaku said:

I would be extremely surprised if the quantity of gold that would now be 'financially viable to recover' would be sufficient to move the price. 

It's a fair question, half your responses are from people missing the point - if it now becomes easy and cheap to get the gold out of the scrap, does that have an affect on how much actually gets recovered (and therefore overall supply, and therefore price).

 

it doesn't work like that.

gold mining and recovery margins are on average consistent with price.

eg mining is 25% energy cost. if the price of gold goes up 10% in line with inflation then

the price of energy has also gone up 10% in line with inflation(on average). miners will

still be on 25% energy cost. over long periods of time the gold price follows inflation +

deviation.

a similar calculation can be done for recovering from scrap. the energy and materials

cost stays within a consistent %(inline with inflation).

 

HH

[Vai]

I get the feeling that most are just replying to the concept of getting gold from scrap electronics right now with current techniques, rather than the article I linked to, so I'll quote the relevant part:

Quote

 

Finally, the polymer was put through a pretty authentic test. The researchers took seven circuit boards from a junkyard and put them in an acid bath to leach out the metals. Then they mixed in their polymer, adjusted the solution, and kept it stirring for a couple of days. (Although other tests showed that 99 percent of gold can be scavenged in about 30 minutes.) Filtering separated out the polymer and its haul of gold. Adding acid again causes the polymer to let go of the gold, which precipitated as a solid nugget that accounted for 94 percent of the gold leached from the circuit boards.

Given the results, the economic case for this technique seems easy to make. The researchers say the polymer costs about $5 per gram to produce, and that gram can capture $64 in gold. And since the polymer can be reused, it would be considerably cheaper than that over time, adding little to the overall cost of a recycling operation.

“Although [printed circuit boards] contain more precious metals than the ores in mines,” the team writes, “80 percent of this waste still goes to landfills chiefly because of the lack of selective, high-yield, noncyanide recovery procedures.” As similar processes are found to more easily harvest other elements, all that waste is going to increasingly look like economic opportunity—and help close the loop by turning old devices into new ones instead of trash.

 

So this is looking at reclaiming gold cheaply and efficiently, possibly in the near future if it scales up. That is why I was interested in what everyone thought might be the potential gold price impact of this technology. Even if only 9% of gold is used in electronics now, that figure may well increase with the increasing prevalence of digital systems in everything. If most of that is recycled instead of lost isn't that a lot of gold potentially staying in supply instead of being lost annually?

[Robb]

The white paper only talks about the refining process.  That is but one step in a very complex chain that begins with the end user when the product that contains the gold reaches it EOL.

The steps needed to get a classroom computer from say, a Cleveland, Ohio school district to a  PCB gold refiner in Canada and eventually to a manufacturer (either coin/bullion/jewelry or electronic/industrial )  has to be included in any economic calculus.  The white paper can't (and doesn't) address those factors, which you would need to know in order to determine if the entire process (not just the reclamation) would be profitable.

Collecting the billions upon billions of PCBs and CPUs for recycling would take intervention and cooperation on a global scale that the planet has never seen.   There are over 1 billion smart phones sold each year.   Couple of hundred million other electronic devices...You would need a lot of drop off bins scattered around the planet to collect them all 😉

If you were to recycle even 1/2 of those billions of devices and extract ALL the gold out of them you would have a lump of the shiny yellow stuff equal to about 5% of production.  Is that 5 percent enough to move a market?  A market that is controlled by "them" ??  A market that really only exists for jewelry/coins/bullion?

I don't think I would worry about it in our lifetime....

 

 

 

[Martlet]

4 hours ago, Robb said:

The white paper only talks about the refining process.  That is but one step in a very complex chain that begins with the end user when the product that contains the gold reaches it EOL.

The steps needed to get a classroom computer from say, a Cleveland, Ohio school district to a  PCB gold refiner in Canada and eventually to a manufacturer (either coin/bullion/jewelry or electronic/industrial )  has to be included in any economic calculus.  The white paper can't (and doesn't) address those factors, which you would need to know in order to determine if the entire process (not just the reclamation) would be profitable.

Collecting the billions upon billions of PCBs and CPUs for recycling would take intervention and cooperation on a global scale that the planet has never seen.   There are over 1 billion smart phones sold each year.   Couple of hundred million other electronic devices...You would need a lot of drop off bins scattered around the planet to collect them all 😉

If you were to recycle even 1/2 of those billions of devices and extract ALL the gold out of them you would have a lump of the shiny yellow stuff equal to about 5% of production.  Is that 5 percent enough to move a market?  A market that is controlled by "them" ??  A market that really only exists for jewelry/coins/bullion?

I don't think I would worry about it in our lifetime....

Your point about a needing a supply chain (unsupply chain?) is valid, however it isnt a problem. As i note before we already do this in UK and Europe. Old electronic equipment is collected up at local (town/city) level recycling centres then send to county or regional level recycling plant.  Need a catchment area large enough to give the operation enough scale, wouldn't move beyond state level in US unless someone found it efficient to move further.  There would be a sweet spot of transporting bulk waste devices vs plant size economically . 

I'm told by a friend working in one of these places, devices are brought in and stripped of copper, metals, plastics are shredded for recycling.  PCBs taken to a onsite unit (described as a portacabin) where they are processed for gold and other material.  Nothing comes out that isnt bailed up for another recycling process.  This was in operation some 2-3yrs when gold was around £900-1000/$1200-1300, so its commercially viable at lower levels than today.   

As for effect on the market, well if its in place in europe we can say its already in the price, further recycling/recovery would have little effect on supply. The process using the polymer sounds pretty much the same as present, with the polymer acting as a precipitate (?), replacing only one step in the process. If this relating to handling of toxic chemicals it sounds like its more environmental than economic impact. 

[Prophecy]

You'll make more money from the ads in the YouTube video than you will from refining what you find. So don't forget to film it.

[47Ag79Au78Pt]

5 hours ago, Prophecy said:

You'll make more money from the ads in the YouTube video than you will from refining what you find. So don't forget to film it.

I totally agree. I’ve actually trialled several methods for reclaiming gold, platinum and palladium from eWaste/car parts (totally failed with the Pt and the Pd.) The headline figures that are often quoted (are wildly inaccurate), is that, there’s 1000 times more gold in eWaste than in Kimberly gold ore, and you “don’t even have to dig for it.”  What isn’t mentioned is that you need hundreds of kilos of good quality eWaste to get any sort of profit from whatever you recover because of all the processing and toxic byproduct disposal costs... (unless you live in a country with minimal environmental controls and a plentiful supply of everyone else’s rubbish). .  The only advantage of polymer extraction is that it has a lower environmental impact than other methods.  The methods I had a go at used mercury distillation, gold-cyanide complex formation and dissolving the gold in a lethal fuming mixture of concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acids.  They were highly effective methods for recovering every last scrap of gold... but you need one helluva lot of eWaste to yield anything of significance, and the eWaste has to be of a good quality.

After 2 weeks of processing, My “nugget” weighed in at an eye-watering 3.077g.  Whoop whoop! With costs included, I would have obtained more gold working 2 weeks at McDonalds, and just buying some with my wages!!

There are just way too many ways to either kill yourself or all of the living things around you, so if using polymer flocculants, reduces the potential for pollution or death buy mercury dumping or inhaling hydrogen cyanide gas, that’s a brilliant discovery, but it will only replace the existing (effective but lethal) processes in use already.  It’s also not going to increase yield, but reduce refining costs only if the polymers are cheap to buy and use  

@Martlet and @Robb nailed the economics of eWaste PM recovery: 1) Huge Scale, 2) Complex upstream and downstream supply & processing chains. 

However, look up the economics of Apple’s buyback scheme. They do make a shedload of cash reprocessing their phones but the quantities are mind boggling, and probably polluting someone else’s back yard.

Apologies for nerding on. 

[Robb]

2 hours ago, 47Ag79Au78Pt said:

However, look up the economics of Apple’s buyback scheme. They do make a shedload of cash reprocessing their phones

In 2016 Apple recovered 1,000 kilos of gold, $6.4 million USD worth of copper, and $3.2 million USD of aluminum from their recycling efforts.  They happily show up once a year and take all our e-waste for no charge:  Monitors, keyboards, mice, networking equipment, computers, phones, anything electronic.  Previously, we had to pay to for the removal and it became quite expensive.