Turning E-Waste Materials into Precious Metals
Rice University demonstrates potential for urban mining using the flash Joule heating method to extract valuable metals from e-waste.
“We found a way to get the precious metals back and turn e-waste into a sustainable resource,” said Rice lab chemist, James Tour. “The toxic metals can be removed to spare the environment.”
Transcript
00:00:06 the largest growing source of waste in the world is electronic waste or called e-waste it is this waste that comes from computer circuit boards cell phones this this type of waste that just accumulates and accumulates and right now a lot of that is gathered and sent overseas for reprocessing but it is an environmental disaster
00:00:35 but what we found is we can take printed circuit boards [Music] grind them up and subject them to flash joule heating this is a system that we built for making graphene but now what we do is we put just the the ground up printed circuit board into this reactor and we flash it in
00:00:59 less than one second with a high voltage and a high current [Music] and we can get out all the precious metals that are in there so you'll have in there often gold you'll have palladium platinum silver and we can get these to come out and these will volatilize out we can
00:01:20 also get the rare earth elements which are highly sought after materials [Music] oh if we do this by uh by traditional method like the hydro methodological process it takes maybe a few days to to recover the precious metals from the uh circuit board but in all process when yes we just take a few seconds or just within one second
00:01:49 i think this technology will within within the first couple of years we'll begin to get this scaled up and this could transition in three or four or five years to be to have plants all around the world doing this so that you don't have to take these printed circuit boards and ship them to other countries other third world nations and contaminate those countries with these
00:02:11 processes that it would be processed right here they will all be locally processed that's the whole idea you