Saturday 18 March 2017

How to Recover Gold from Cell phones?



The cell phone has become an essential thing in our life today. We seem to be incomplete without cell phones. And it is a plus point for the E-waste recyclers. There is a great variation in the yields of precious metals from the cell phones of different makes. I mean, you don’t get the same amount of precious metals from all the cell phones. Branded mobile phones give you better gold recovery than the cheaper ones, especially, made in china. If you dismantle a cell phone, you will find the gold on its motherboard (PCB), the connectors in cell phones are gold plated. The chips on the mobile motherboard also have gold in them.
Before recovering gold from the cell phones, you have to dismantle them. The ceramic capacitors in the cell phones contain silver, gold, palladium and sometime platinum also. So, first of all remove all the components from the motherboards carefully. There are many videos on YouTube that explain the dismantling of cell phones. You can watch one or two videos and understand the whole process.
First, we will talk about gold recovery from mobile PCB. These days there are many non cyanide gold recovery chemical compounds with different brand names available in the market. You can search them on the net and buy one. They are very economical and most of them are made in China. Their brochures provide you complete details about how to use the chemicals for gold recovery. So, for gold recovery from mobile PCBs, you can use that chemical. Another option is cyanide gold recovery also. But cyanide is harmful. If you need some help about it. You can write to me also.
Secondly, we need to recover gold from gold plated connectors used in mobile phones. You can use nitric acid for it. Gold recovery from gold plated pins through nitric acid is also a good process. But you should do it in an open place or an appropriately ventilated room.
Thirdly, you have to process chips for gold recovery. Chips are first burnt, and then ground into a fine powder. Then the pins are separated from the powder/ash through a sieve. Store these pins, and when you have a saleable quantity of these pins, you can sell them to a smelter.
The fine ash contains the very thin gold wires used in bonding in the integrated circuits. So, you can wash away all the ash with water using a metal bowl. This method is known as panning. There are many companies who sell these panning bowls. They show you a demo also. It is not very expensive. You can get it at an affordable price. After removing the ash, you have silicon chips and golden wires left in the bowl. You can recycle that gold with aqua regia.
Apart from chips, there are other components also on the motherboard that contain gold. They can also be treated with aqua regia for gold recovery.
I have intentionally kept the article short. Mentioning all the details about gold recovery processes would make the article too long. And some people might find a long article boring. So, I have given the basic ideas about the processes mentioned above. You can always write to me, if you need to know more about any of the processes mentioned in the article. You can reach me through my website: www.recovercomputergold.com

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Wish you all the success in your endeavors & thanks for your time!

आपसे निवेदन है कि हमारी पोस्ट को लाइक करें , अपने कमेन्ट्स दें , शेयर करें

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Friday 17 March 2017

Is there any future for e-waste recycling in India?

E-waste recycling undoubtedly holds a great future in India. But you have to streamline this trade. Last year, 1.85 million tons of e-waste was generated in India.
We are all  increasingly getting addicted to a variety of electronic devices. So, obviously, every year the quantity of e-waste in India is going to be even more. India is marching towards prosperity at a faster pace. And this has given the Indian consumer a great power to buy good brands of mobiles and laptops, etc... Expensive brands use more precious metals in their gadgets. And, as a result, when recycling companies recycle precious metals from them, they make more profit.
Electronic scrap recycling is a metal business. Metal business has many advantages- it is a cash business. Any metal sells like hot cakes. Iron is the cheapest metal compared to copper and aluminum, etc.; you can even sell this metal any time on the phone. The reason being, every metal finds so many uses that its demand never decreases. There could be little timely fluctuation in the prices sometimes, but it does not affect the demand much. These factors plus many more make people opt for e-waste recycling business in India.
All the big companies just want to get rid of e-waste because they want their place clean. That’s why they dispose of their e-waste either at a very little price or free of any charge. Some of the workers of the big firms are very careless. They throw away the computer or just any other electronic device even with the slightest fault. And the recyclers benefit a great deal from this practice. When the recyclers pick up CPUs or monitors from big companies, they segregate them and have those machines tested and refurbished. Around 30 to 40 percent material, be it computers or mobile phones or just any other e-scrap becomes functional with slight repair. And, this way, recyclers make a lot of profit. And this will never stop.
Another important thing that goes in favour of the licensed recyclers is that the government has made a law that only licensed recyclers can pick up the material now, because 80% e-waste in India is processed in illegal/unauthorized sector. And the people in the unauthorized sector don’t use any machines to process it. They simply burn big piles of it in the open and create a lot of pollution. Until sometime back, it was a big problem for the authorized e-waste recyclers, because they had tough competition with the small scale illegal sector recyclers. But now, the government of India is very strict about the pollution issues. It is coming down very hard on the unauthorized sector. A lot of the raids are conducted in the illegal sector; the unbilled materials worth hundreds of millions of rupees are seized every month. Severe penalties are imposed. And this goes in favour of the registered recyclers. Because all these strict measures are taking the e-waste recycling industry towards an opportunity which the registered recyclers had long been waiting for. So, there is definitely a good future for e-waste recycling in India in an environment friendly manner.
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Wish you all the best in your endeavors & thanks for your time!

आपसे निवेदन है कि हमारी पोस्ट को लाइक करें , अपने कमेन्ट्स दें , शेयर करें |