Finally, scientists have developed a safer way for extracting all that precious silver from used cell phones, keyboards, and even old mother boards. With silver prices above $42 per Troy ounce even small amounts of silver that can be extracted from old electronics becomes more tempting. Silver is looking like it's going much, much higher as well!
From Kitco.com, silver price over last five days
Extracting silver and gold from old electronics traditionally requires strong acids and chemicals that can be very hazardous if you don't what you're doing. Cyanide leaching is used on an industrial level which is even nastier stuff. The solution: using cooking oil to do the extraction in a much safer and environmentally friendly way.
When I first read an article about it I wanted to get started! But it turns out there is a catch (like always)... After reading the scientific paper from the study, the first step in the process involves extracting the fatty acids from the cooking oil. This is an involved process as they found their crude extracts didn't work well and had to use distillation to get them pure enough for the reaction to work. So unless you have an organic chemistry lab setup in your basement it would probably be easier just to buy purified fatty acid extracts. Industrial purified they aren't inexpensive.
From here it gets easy, simply cut up your silver containing waste into small squares and immerse it into the fatty acids and add a small amount of hydrogen peroxide. Heat to 60 degrees Celsius (140 F) an stir for 18 hours, an electronic stirrer might make you arms hurt a lot less... Then dump the fatty acid solution through a filter and add ethanol. A good use for that old ever clear bottle! Stir it in the right wavelengths of light for 96 hours and you will precipitate out pure silver!
So, there went my dreams of some easy way to extract silver. Turns out it's a little harder than advertised, but can be done relatively inexpensively. The best part is the fatty acids can be used over and over, so once you have them the rest really isn't that bad.
This process will likely lead to small operations extracting silver in a much more environmentally friendly manner. I wouldn't mind giving it a try, but it sounds like an investment in some expensive lab equipment to make it practical.
samaterials.com
But just imagine producing your own pure silver powder from old electronic waste. Don't forget, you can also extract the the gold using whey proteins as well. Extracting precious metals may become something everyone can do at home in the next couple of years!
That will wrap up my post for this Monday. I hope you found it interesting, and if you want to get deeper into the chemistry check out my references at the science direct web site. It takes you to the original scientific paper. Please feel free to leave any comments or ask any questions below, and thanks for taking the time to look over my post. Thank you for all of your support, it's greatly appreciated! Have a great week everyone!
References:
https://www.kitco.com/charts/silver
https://scitechdaily.com/eco-friendly-alchemy-turning-waste-into-silver-using-everyday-oils/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1385894725029559?via%3Dihub
Disclaimer
I am not a financial planner and this isn't financial advice. Please always do your own research before investing your money. You worked hard enough to earn it!
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