Gadgetory

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 a weight 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 our electronic devices manufactured by companies like a new 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's recycling Technology Inc Ambaji $100 chip these are some coupons on the web why Putin creation why she went Jimmy's very quiet open towards a change all so for example cooller masters 25th anniversary edition cosmos 2 features a unique dual curved tempered glass side panel check it out now at the link 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 SRT I was kind enough to take us deep inside the bowels of one of their four facilities here in Cali n 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 are 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 three to four minutes later depending on the elements in the waste it can be pulled out washed cooled dried and then open to reveal some scraps from LED production so what you see here is a stripped old 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 a thousand degrees Celsius to destroy the dioxins then rapidly drops the temperature down to 200 degrees Celsius to prevent them from reforming this process can yield as much as a kilogram of silver per hundred kilograms 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 Kings 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 thousand degrees the vapours 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 cat 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 4:00 to 5:00 9:00 fine grade two kilogram 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 two kilos or gold worth so how much is this one worth Oh like a hundred thousand Canadian or so no no not so much so each month then 130 people working at SRT I turn about 200 metric tons of what would otherwise be a waste into a hundred kilograms of gold 800 to 900 kilograms 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 home you've probably heard maybe even on this show that browsing the internet with a VPN is safer and more secure but if it looks complicated never fear tunnel there has got you covered tunnel bear is a simple download and then basically one button you press the button and boom your connection gets encrypted keeping your Internet traffic private from advertisers and even your internet service provider and you appear as though you are browsing the Internet and use online services as though you are in a different country so I'm not going to 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