When you think of electronics manufacturing in Asia, understandably
there are a lot of words that probably pop into your mind. Toxic chemicals, air
pollution, hazardous waste, e-waste,
heavy metals. And you know what? These are real problems that anyone with half
a brain can hopefully agree that we need
to solve. So then what is being done on
the small island nation of Taiwan where according to the economist 40% of their
annual exports are electronic devices
manufactured by companies like ASUS, HTC
and Acer. To find out, we went about an
hour out of the city to sit down and chat with Mr. Stan Sue, the president of
Sue Recycling Technology, Inc.
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below. In circuit board manufacturing,
as in baking, there is always some leftover material when the finished
product is cut out. But unlike baking,
you can't just fold it up and cut again. So, what do you do? To answer that, SRTI
was kind enough to take us deep inside the bowels of one of their four
facilities here in Tawyen, Taiwan, where they're using techniques created in
collaboration with several universities under the supervision of the
Environmental Protection Bureau to extract valuable metals like gold,
silver, and platinum from leftovers so
they can be reused instead of ending up in a landfill. or a pile in a developing
country somewhere. And the goal is to do this in the most ecologically
responsible way possible. So, some of
the e-waste coming in the door takes a pretty familiar form. Printed circuit
boards, integrated circuits, and the like. These get picked up from partners,
shredded right in front of the partners to protect their valuable intellectual
property, and then the shreds get placed into these stainless steel cages.
They're round so that they can be spun around like a clothes dryer to optimize
contact with the solvent that you have got to be kidding me cyanide. I
immediately I was like is that safe? And they were like of course not. What a
stupid question. That's why we have these gas detectors, fume hoods, and
goofy clothes. So anyway, the crane grabs the cage and submerges it in the
cyanide, spins it around, and then as little as 3 to four minutes later,
depending on the elements in the waste, it can be pulled out, washed, cooled,
dried, and then opened to reveal some
scraps from LED production. So what you
see here is a stripped gold copper
alloy. Any exposed gold has actually
been dissolved into the cyanide. So, it
gets put into these one-ton drums for further processing. But we'll come back
to that a little bit later. First, we need to take a look at some of the
e-waste that you might not recognize as potentially valuable. These bags are
full of cloths that were used to clean
electronic parts during manufacturing. So they pick up trace amounts of
valuable metals like aluminum, silver, and maybe even gold that can be
extracted by the coolest means possible
with fire. But burning these cloths
normally would release toxic and environmentally harmful chemicals called
dioxins. So that's where the furnace, as
it's been nicknamed, comes in. Unlike some crude burn barrel, it uses two
combustion chambers. A primary one to
burn down the fabric and melt metals like silver and a secondary chamber that
takes the exhaust and turns it up to
around 1,000° C to destroy the dioxins,
then rapidly drops the temperature down to 200° C to prevent them from
reforming. This process can yield as
much as a kilogram of silver per 100 kg
of cloth and a lot of ash that can
actually be used for concrete production. The remnants from the
burning process come with us to the next station. They're heated up in a titanium
container in a king's water bath. This
mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid dissolves gold and platinum, but not the
other so-called noble metals. Then
anything that we don't need gets filtered out here before the yellow
liquid is carted over to the next station, electrolysis. They are used to
extract the gold from both our king's
water and cyanide solutions from before.
The negative terminal is on the left and the positive is on the right with a
stirring motor in the middle. The terminals will collect other things
while the gold in a porous form called
sponge gold collects in a titanium container. This process continues for 24
hours and the voltages applied to extract this purity of gold are
apparently trade secrets that they wouldn't allow us to show. Once all the
gold is extracted, the liquid gets transferred to another facility where
they're focused on taking out silver.
Leading us then finally to where the magic really happens, the casting room.
Our sponge gold is heated to over
a,000°. The vapors you see being captured by the fume hood are small acid
impurities. Then some regular household
borax is added to act as a flux and purifying agent. And the gold gets
poured into a
cast. Yes, my friends, you are witnessing the birth of a gold brick.
The cast gets poured into water to cool and harden it. Then it's actually still
pretty warm when it comes out. Our 4 to
59 fine grade 2 kg gold brick is ready
for polishing and transfer to the vault
which they unfortunately wouldn't let us inside. So I don't even know how much
what's 2 kilos of gold worth.
Take out the mass and see your smile.
So how how much is this one worth? Uh
maybe 40,000 N. Oh, like a 100,000 Canadian or
so. Sorry.
No, no, not so much. So each month then
the 130 people working at SRTI turn
about 200 metric tons of what would otherwise be e-waste into 100 kg of
gold, 800 to 900 kg of silver, and about
a metric ton of copper. Unbelievable. A
huge shout out to them for allowing us behind the scenes to see how they've
built an amazing business out of reusing and recycling precious materials while
minimizing the environmental impact of the electronics manufacturing taking
place on their island
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