Remember our teaser post on turning handphone into gold?
It’s true. And we’ve got the video to prove it.
In addition to gold, recyclers can extract copper, paper, plastics and precious metals from our E-waste via the recycling process. And that’s the interesting part of it.
According to Adrian Tan, executive director of Tes-Amm (Singapore), “What gets people interested is the precious metals that you see recovered. Very often, that equates to gold. There are resources but there isn’t a lot of it. It takes a huge volume [about 50,000 phones] to generate 1 kg of gold bar.”
Recycling as mentioned earlier is more than just re-mining for gold. It’s about deconstructing a product and extracting raw materials for reuse.
Adrian says, “They are referred to as ‘raw materials’ stream and they are typically channelled back to specialised recyclers of those products. So extracted paper would go to a paper recycler, and extracted plastics to a plastic recycler.”
That’s how they get a second life…
How does E-waste recycling work?
It’s quite straightforward. Let’s say we have a phone.
The phone gets dismantled into its component parts.
Despite advances in technology, this part is labour-intensive as “We can’t accurately predict the materials that we’ll be getting. We could be processing a laptop today, cellphones tomorrow. The screws are located in different parts. So it’s almost impossible to have a process that automates the dismantling activity.” said Adrian.
From here onwards, everything is automated and mechanised. The printed circuit boards are sunk into a solution that dissolves the gold.
Now you’ll get two things: Circuit boards without gold, and a solution with dissolved gold. Form here it diverges into two paths:
Circuit boards without gold
- a. The circuit boards get crushed into itsy-bitsy pieces.
- b. The now-unidentifiable bits are separated into metallic and non-metallic elements.
- c. Metallic elements are cast into ingots; non-metallic elements are turned into plastic pallets
Gold solution
- a. Electrolysis is used to extract the gold from the solution
- b. The gold is refined and cast into ingots.
And that’s how it works.
Onto Recycling: What goes out, comes back in
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