How Scrappers Cash In On Gold From Your Old Computer | World Wide Waste | Business Insider

This bar of

gold

came from the trash, in fact the materials inside electronic devices that are thrown away each year are worth an estimated $60 billion there is plaum there is tantalum there is tin there is lead there is steel to extract the most precious metals generally it takes brute force or a powerful acid But in many places scavengers who process electronic

waste

cannot afford adequate safety measures, so now a growing number of individual recyclers are showing that they can make money by safely handling it in their own garages. . Instead, we could recycle all of our e-

waste

nationally. to export it abroad Wade Collie is a garbage diver with a mission to keep electronic devices out of landfills.

His work led him to partner with a startup that grinds circuit boards and collects and recovers metals from them using a secret drink that comes from nature. It's microbial, some of the fungus from it, so how much money do solo Scrappers really make? Can they change the way global ew trade works? We went to Sydney, Australia to find out that everyone knows when the Wade Collie is coming through town. The nicknames are flashing because it's red and it's electric and it's buzzing everywhere today you're on

your

way to a local repair shop that puts aside devices it can't repair, they didn't really have a way to recycle things and they really wanted to do it for the last decade, electronic waste around the

world

.

The

world

has grown at least 60% as of 2019, there are more than 50 million metric tons of garbage every year. Only Wade Works breaks down with drills, screwdrivers and these are actually electric garden trimmers but I've repurposed them so I can cut wires. This job carries risks, but Wade takes precautions, so I have to put on my respirator to get these fluorescent tubes out because if they break, they have mercury inside, which is obviously poison. After a few minutes of work, he finally discovers the treasure he is in. then this is the main circuit board and this is where all the

gold

and silver is on all the little black chips.

Wade works to ensure every part of a device is handled properly, even hard-to-recycle plastic to recover copper gold. and palladium inside circuit boards is possible at mass recycling facilities, but it is expensive and requires corporations and consumers to properly dispose of their devices. Today, only about 9% of e-waste in Australia is formally collected. The US is only slightly better at 15%, so they are unwanted. Technology piles up on the sidewalk waiting for treasure hunters to find it. There is another good board. I imagine that small recyclers and

scrappers

will continue to grow as a force both in the United States and in many other developed countries.

Ernie Petri is a retired Navy captain who began scrapping in 2019. His YouTube channel Shark Scrapper is one of hundreds teaching people about the

business

. Every minute you spend breaking things is eating into

your

margin and sometimes you might only make, you know, a couple of dollars a year. time on something, if you're just doing this as a one person operation from the back of your truck, you'd be better off just going to work at McDonald's, scrapping isn't worth it until you can invest in heavy equipment that can cost tens of thousands of dollars when you put it on one of our vibrating tables the metals go in one direction and the waste in another Jason Gabber comes from the world of underground mining, but now he sells crushers that can be used for E-Waste E. -To For many, the waste will only be for the rich or the future.

Scrapping remains a side hustle, but for some of the world's poorest people it is the only way to make a living. Every year, rich countries ship thousands of tons of e-waste to places like Delhi, India, a world capital of the Unregulated e-waste recycling, he was 14 when we spoke to him in 2023, is one of the estimated 50,000 people who scavenge here, mostly through piles imported from countries like the United States and China. gzar starts his morning selling breakfasts at his father's food cart after school heading to piles of trash like this one to sort through old cell phones,

computer

s and video game controllers.

Few people doing this work have access to gloves or other safety devices, and to get to the valuable metals, many scavengers burn electronic waste. a problem that experts say has lasting impacts on human health, including stunted growth, miscarriages, organ damage and loss of bone density in 2021. India recycled a third of the 1.5 million metric tons of electronic waste. It produced a recycling rate roughly double that of North America, but only a fraction of Indian waste was handled by licensed recyclers, not to mention the country. It imports approximately 50,000 metric tons of e-waste each year. His

business

revives me.

Wade's attempt to prevent e-waste from being sent overseas would have a really good impact globally. If instead of exporting abroad and putting it in the hands of those less fortunate to be able to take care of our own waste today. Wade is dropping off a truck full of materials he collected at Mint Innovation, a local startup that grinds circuit boards. Hey, how are you doing? Hello, well, thank you for coming. like a nice couple of lots you brought here, Mint pays you about $350 a kilo, so today you made about $3500, how much did you bring in today?

A tunnel together, usually, we'll get something like, I don't know, um 250. There could be 300 kilos of copper in there and maybe you know 100 to 200 gam of gold, we'll see where we go with that, but I have a strange sample here gold processor. for you now a down payment, you may have to pay it back, but Mint processes e-waste through a liquid bath of bacteria, fungi, and other organic materials. Business Insider first visited Mints' pilot facility in New Zealand in 2021 and now the company has expanded its scale with a facility. here in Sydney, Australia, it is almost five times larger, so this is our first plant, and what we are preparing is to be able to build them in several cities around the world.

It is almost completely automated, preventing workers from coming into direct contact with hazardous materials. The circuit boards moving up the double-deck conveyor belt contain approximately 70% plastic and 30% metals such as copper, silver, padium and gold. This machine crushes them into smaller particles which will then dissolve into liquid. We have a big plastic tank behind me. 25,000 L will remain in this mixing tank for a few hours and then will be sent to one of the filter presses. This blue fluid contains a high concentration of copper, tin and other less valuable metals. The mint uses electricity to extract the copper we simply put it through a series of plates, we pass it over the top and they have electric current flowing through them and that removes the copper from the solution now the solution is ready to extract the gold, That's where the minimal special sauce comes in.

The Mint team identified these little helpers in 2017, through a series of research trips to places like abandoned mines or fields with rusty equipment, collecting species of bacteria and fungi that evolve to bind with specific metals so you can see this Residual dark purple color which is the leftover biomass that has the gold stuck. to it and these beautiful purple nanoparticles were formed, the purple cake will go to an external refiner to become something easier to recognize, so this gold bar that I have in my hands weighs approximately 1.2 1.3 kilos And that's how much gold this facility recovers each day.

It's an operation at current prices worth almost $85,000 in gold. The company says its Sydney plant could recover more than $30 million worth of gold each year. Mint also says its process. It has a smaller environmental footprint compared to other forms of industrial recycling. What we have created is a closed loop system where what actually leaves the plant is benign and not a chemical waste. That's what helped convince Wade to process his treasures here. It feels amazing to see that my circuit boards have finally got to the right place and I know that they are being recycled correctly and it's really cool to see everything in its place now.

Wade started collecting old electronics when he was just a teenager, he kept them in his and my mother's garage. I'm constantly saying, do you think there's a way to condense this a little bit so we can get out the front door? This is a 1960's television made in Australia. This was my first laptop or old piece. of technology that kind of started my obsession with anything old and electrical and stuff like that, yeah, I just like to play with them and see if I can get them to work again. I think it's important from a historical point of view to maintain things like this. because there are fewer of these older systems every day and yes, in my opinion, they are actually worth a lot more than the gold and silver they contain, but Wade may want to consider mining some of his own collection.

To build them as before, it is true that starting in the late 90s, many companies began to use gold-plated wiring instead of solid gold to reduce costs, for example, the integrated circuits of a 1982 IBM PC are now They sell for about $180 a pound for Apple CPUs, something you'd find inside a neon iMac from 20 years later only costs about $4 a pound for most of the

computer

uh hardware isn't that valuable um, Of course, there will be some gold, some copper, some platinum, some padium, but minimal amounts, environmental activist Jim Pucket. We started the Basil or Ban Action Network in 1997 to monitor and stop the illegal export of hazardous waste such as e-waste.

We need to think about managing our waste as a service to society because we don't want to be dumped with waste, we don't want pollution. Wade says his business will continue to generate modest income until he can invest in new equipment, but doing the right thing is what keeps him going. It motivates me to know that they're actually going to be recycled and not end up in a landfill, and then my hobby is kind of like that. He feeds off of that because you know that when I do old things I quite enjoy it, so yes, it is a job that makes me feel very good.