Mexico’s proposed higher mining royalties could block nearly $7bn in investments
The Mexican government proposed raising mining royalties under the argument that metal prices have risen in recent years.
Researchers at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque are using ultrasonic waves to strip gold from SIM cards.
In a report by ABC, materials chemist Dale Huber said that even though many different research groups are trying to recover the yellow metal from electronic waste, in most cases they are using environmentally unfriendly techniques like separating gold from other components by boiling off mercury and letting the fumes go into the air.
To avoid such practice, Huber’s team is submerging SIM cards in water and blasting it with ultrasonic waves. The process creates bubbles that collapse and when they do so, they can “shoot out a jet that hits the surface and actually physically breaks off pieces of metals,” Huber told the Australian broadcaster.
The researchers are still in the process of refining the new method, however, the idea is to develop the technology into a larger scale operation.
2 Comments
Kruger Eldest
Total nonsense.
It is not profitable to extract the gold from modern devices.
The gold is mixed with nickel and copper to lower the karat to effectively 5% volume.
You are left with nickel/copper acid after seperation that is highly toxic. And cannot be effectively seperate for the volume needed.
Basically end total. 0.000000012% gold per simply card I unit weight on micro simply.
Slightly more on nano sim simply due to less plastic.
Chemical costs and labour costs per ton of materials is more cost than the gold extracted.
This editorial in modern gold does not include actual profitable materials.
Instead it focused on the bigest single waste of time any modern Non Ferous Presious metals recycler gets to deal with.
Also. From personal experience.
I have way to much time on my hands and had lots of materials to get the % extraction volume.
Info is available online?
snuffy
“Non Ferous Presious metals”
That killed your credibility.