Extracting Gold from Computer Circuit Boards?

A. The amount of gold you will get from 4 tons of circuit boards may not be worth the effort and cost.

There are at least two ways to get the gold: (1) cut off the tabs and strip them in cyanide (2) burn the entire collection, smelt the copper and gold out of the ash, then extract the gold from the copper. Both methods are highly regulated environmentally, as well as being dangerous. I suggest you stay out of the business.

"Recovery and Refining Of precious Metals"
by C.W. Ammen

on AbeBooks

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Amazon

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A. Hello, those boards if made before 1990 should be worth a dollar per pound after you cut the gold plated material off. There are better ways of gold extraction other than cyanide. I have refined gold for many years and have never used any form of cyanide. Use a dilute Aqua-regia.

Ed. note: Arnold is claiming that the tab area of pre-1990 boards, if cut off and weighed separately, and the rest of the board discarded, is worth a dollar a pound

A. Hi, Marie, Heather, Matthew --

E-waste has become a curse on the planet. The first problem is that amateur recycling scatters toxic waste everywhere. Add to it that the cost of recycling the whole item is so close to break even that the rest of the toxins become unrecoverable and just get buried everywhere if people pick through the waste recovering the easiest of the gold. The following video, and there are dozens like it from many major environmental organizations, explains why leaving scrapped electronics "whole" is the pivotal ingredient in the world gaining control over our e-waste problem:

One convenient widget for locating green recyclers is on the Crutchfield site at
www.crutchfield.com/environmental-policy/recycling.html ⇩.

Regards,

Ed. update: The above link broke almost immediately. Thankfully, the Internet Archive preserved a copy here
Please consider a donation to The Internet Archive.

A. Hi, Tod. There is a "green recycler's pledge", which is intended to make sure the recovery of e-waste becomes part of a sustainable economy.

So "green recyclers" are forbidden from using prison or slave labor, or employing other tactics which make it impossible for sustainable businesses to compete against them. Since it's not possible for sustainable businesses to compete against grant-connected firms where the public pays much of their bills, and grants are not intended to be sustained, grants violate the spirit of the green recycler's pledge. And as we see time & again, when one grant trough runs dry, the grant mills & beltway bandits move on, and the public is left with nothing but bills and shuttered businesses.

Good luck, and by all means solicit grants for substance abuse recovery but not for gold recovery; grants in such fields are a wrecking ball.

A. Ok, curious. I read one on here that said wouldn't be worth the time.
I broke down 5 computers.... I got 2 ounces of GOLD from it... ok, is the GOLD not going for $1000 to $1200 per ounce now?

Chuck C [surname deleted for privacy by Editor]
scrap - Knoxville Tennessee
December 14, 2008

Hi, Chuck. I doubt that your recovered "gold" is anywhere close to pure yet, because it sounds improbable that a computer would have $500 to $600 of gold in it and sell for $399 complete :-)
Please get back to us after you actually receive a check! We sometimes see people post glorious tales about how much money they recovered from scrap, only to find that the same person is selling scrap on eBay ... having made that claim primarily to try to inflate the value of the junk they are hawking :-)

Good luck.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Well here goes. I know it is very possible to profit off of old pc boards because the price of gold was a lot lower then say in the nineties gold may have been 600.00 hundred per ounce compared to now 975.00 per ounce so yes it can be profitable to dissect old boards for gold silver platinum and copper just be careful of health hazards. I will be honest, most people don't want you to know $$$$ in them there computers.

Ed. note: Hi Michael. What would be "most people's" motivation for not wanting you to know? The competition in this business is starving street waifs in Mumbai who remain starving street waifs even after doing these hazardous operations on an endless supply of free surplus electronics and without the cost of protective equipment. The reasons "most people" don't want you to do it are the same reasons cited by every major environmental organization -- scattering toxins absolutely everywhere while 'cherry picking' in a way that makes responsible recycling impossible :-)

A. This strikes me as improbable, Mark, but if you can provide a reference I'd certainly love to look at it.

Regards,

A. Hi, Jim. If they are dime sized (0.0207 in³) and four of them weigh 1 ounce, then their density is 12 oz per cubic inch, i.e., .75 pounds/in³, which is much heavier than silver or lead, a little heavier than gold, and about the weight of platinum.

For this to have any validity, though, you need to actually weigh them, not guess, and you need to actually measure them, not eyeball it. If you can't easily calculate their volume, look up why Archimedes shouted "Eureka!" -- if you drop them in water they will displace an equal volume of water, which is very easy to measure with a 'graduated cylinder' ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links]

If they are as heavy as you say, they're worth taking to a jeweler or "we buy gold" shop to be checked because only precious metals or tungsten would be this heavy.

Regards,

A. In reference to the platinum in computers, i.e., hard drives. there is only a very thin layer of in located on the disks themselves and even the amount in that is based on the age of the hard drive. the process involved in recovering that involves a lye solution which can be EXTREMELY dangerous using if all safety precautions are not followed.

A. Your circuit boards are worth Serious money if you have "tons" of them.

Average Circuit Board Values range from 25 Cents per pound for low grade power supply boards to over $4 per pound for main frame computer boards.

There has not been any computer related product with any solid gold since the early 70's and that was some main switch gear from at&t.

Everything else is gold plate from 10,000th's of an inch for standard computer products to 30,000th's of an inch for military specs.

An average pc (personal computer) has a mother board, and a few riser boards. Current market value for these mother boards is $2 per pound, and $2.50 per pound for the riser boards---better known as "finger" boards ---because of the gold plate edge connector plate.

Processor Chips which we refer to as "high-grade" can be worth $25 to as much as $100 per pound.

Hope that helps everybody---don't get "snowed".

A. To Patti L: Your pins off the chips are most likely gold-ruthenium alloy, still valuable. Ru is paramagnetic so it will stick to a magnet. The gold passes the acid test, and Ru tests magnetic.

A. Hi, John. You pose a very interesting question, but it isn't answerable until 'recyclable' is rigorously defined, because nearly 100% of anything is recyclable in the very broadest sense, i.e., it is possible to recover the original material if you work hard enough at it.

So, if you spend 2 pounds of chemicals and some effort to recover 1 pound of gold, it was recycled and very clearly worth it. But if you spend 2 pounds of chemicals and create 2 pounds of waste in order to recover a pound of sand, the sand was 'recycled' but it was not sensible. How about to recover a pound of copper or a pound of iron?

A good way we can answer your question is by considering something recyclable if it is economically viable to recycle it. People will pay you for aluminum cans, so they are recyclable. People will charge you to dispose of plastic containers (because it's cheaper to make them from raw materials than recycled material), so they are not recyclable.

Since people charge you money to recycle a computer, rather than people paying you money, computers are presently "not recyclable". As a general rule, the plastic parts are not recyclable, the metal probably is.

Regards,

A. I believe this web page answers how to separate gold and metals from computer equipment: www.shorinternational.com/goldrecovery.htm ⇩

Ed. update: The above link is broken. Thankfully, the Internet Archive preserved a copy here
Please consider a donation to The Internet Archive.

A. First of all, there are more than 2 ways to extract the gold from these pieces. All of the ways that have been so far mentioned are extremely dangerous if you do not know what you're doing, and can be very costly not only to you but to the environment as well. There is a way to get the gold out without aqua regia or cyanide. It is a device called simplicity or the simplicity, I'm not too sure, but it is made by a company called Shor .

I did a lot of research and found this site. www.shorinternational.com/refining.php. Also the thing about the electric current making them magnetic is completely lies and makes no sense at all. Magnets will only stick to iron, cobalt, or nickel. Most of these pieces are nickel and cobalt alloys. Hopefully this site helps anyone looking to start recycling gold for cash.

A. To the people who want to know how much gold, platinum and silver is on electronic scrap you just have to multiply by the actual weight in pound. For gold multiply by .002, for platinum .001, silver .008 this is for electronics scrap segregated but not sorted I hope this is useful for somebody, thanks.

A. Place large copper piece in clean fish tank; cover with distilled water; attach positive of 12v car battery charger ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] to copper piece; attach negative to steel plate; place 2 inches away from copper; turn on. Silver will attract to steel; then scrape. As steel is harder than copper. it is much easier to remove plating.

So, the only thing you can assume is that I'm here "to further my own goals, namely reclaiming myself"?

Regards,

No Ed, it's you who should think before typing -- publicly implying that as forum host I'm trying to mislead readers to protect my own vested interests in a precious metal reclaiming business. It's not just a direct insult it's ridiculous.

This website is my only business and I do NO recycling of this sort. I discourage amateur recycling because: I feel it is quite dangerous; I believe the many environmental groups who say it's causing an environmental nightmare; I think there is little money to be made in a business where starving street urchins in 3rd world countries compete against you yet remain starving.

Regards,

A. The most common gold compounds are auric chloride (AuCl3) and chlorauric .... radii; covalent radius; metallic radius; element bond length; and Van der Waals ...

Place the stripped down circuit board (all IC'S, and plastic, even heat up in oven to 3 °F above the melting point of Solder, which can be 750 °F to 990 deg F, depending on Sn:Pb or Sn:An or even Silver solder. Make sure you don't reach the Gold Melt Temp of 1050 °F.
Then take the remaining Solid material and place it in a glass tub full of Auric chloride in a well ventilated area, the solution must be diluted to 10% AuCl3 and the rest Distilled H2O. Place a 1/4" by 20" long solid Copper rod @ one end of the Glass tub so that 18" is immersed in the Solution, @ the other end of the tub place a 20" Nickel rod immersed 18", put a square wave pulsed 12 vdc/8 amp charge (-) on the copper rod and (+) on the Nickel rod.
Remove the pulsed DC charge about when the boiling stops; with rubber gloves remove the copper rod and clean it with water. The rod will be plated with the gold that was in the circuit boards. Good luck purchasing Auric Chloride, the Dept of Homeland Security might visit you, since it has other malicious uses.

XRF Coating Thickness Analyzer

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Amazon

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A. Hi, Rick. I doubt that these electronic components are silver plated; tin is very common on "tabs" and I personally haven't heard of boards with silver connector tabs on them.

I'm not really following why you aren't simply taking the best of the many offers. Determining exactly how much precious metal you have without expensive instrumentation is laborious and requires very good chemical assay technique.

Regards,

A. The connectors at the end of the copper pieces are made of silver but it is very hard to find a buyer for them after they are removed. I've been buying them for about a year and trying new ways of purifying the silver. I have finally found a place to sell them; I sold 4 pounds at 20 dollars an ounce. Not bad but you have to watch the cost of doing all this; if not careful you may lose money.

One thing is for certain. If you do not have a chemical background or have worked around acids before, then get educated first BEFORE using them. The danger is real, you can be blinded, horribly burned or even kill yourself. Now, anyone with average intelligence can quickly learn about acids and the dangers of them and the way they plan on using them. Getting reagent grade chemicals of any kind is for the most part difficult for the average person, if not illegal; you can be charged with being in possession of an industrial controlled chemical. Too bad, anything that works really well is generally off limits to the general public. The excuse used is they are concerned about your safety ... more likely they are concerned about their own profit. Better to take your memory cards, industrial silver, etc. and just cash in and be lucky you have some of it and the big boys don't yet have all of it.

A. Sorry, Dawn, it has some silver in it but apparently not enough to be really valuable. That item is available on Craigslist for $30, and ten sticks of a different brand (maybe about a pound in total?) is currently on eBay for $17 including shipping.

Silvabraze on eBay (affil link)

Regards,

A. I have recycled 4 complete pc's /2 routers / 3 dvd drives and a telephone, These cost me £30, I have refined half a troy ounce of pure 24 karet which is worth around £500, Not bad for 15 hours work, £470 profit for 15 hours work. Use a heat gun ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] / paint stripper pointed on the back of the circuit board, use a paint scraper / pliers to scrape all components of the other side of the board. Remove all plastic gubbins prior to heating it with the heat gun otherwise it can get messy. Grade all parts of circuit components into separate containers, i.e., Pot 1 gold plated items, Pot 2 Gold fingers (cut from pcb's), Pot 3 Monolithic Ceramic Capacitors for palladium (tiny rectangle components), Pot 4 Chips for gold and palladium, Pot 5 all other components to re use at home. Pot 1 (gold plated pins) need to reverse electroplate to extract gold before refining with aqua-regia. Pot 2 (gold fingers cut from pcb's) refine with aqua-regia. Pot 3 Monolithic Ceramic Capacitors, collect until you have at least 1 kg, then sell to refinery, you will be nicely surprised on how much you'll get for these little beauties. Pot 4 (chips) crush them up into small pieces, the smaller the better, then refine with aqua-regia to extract the gold, the chips do contain palladium as well, you can either refine it yourself or sell the sludge to a refinery. Pot 4 (Components) these are to keep for re-use or you can sell some of the components online as a lot of these components are rare and can fetch a good price.

Aqua-Regia can be used safely at home under safe controlled conditions. I pledge before anyone uses aqua-regia to take the appropriate safety measures, i.e., lots of research, gloves ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] , apron ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] , googles ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] , fume mask ⇦[this on eBay or Amazon affil links] , bicarbonate soda [in bulk on eBay or Amazon [affil links] to neutralise acids, fume hood / extraction hood, (my hood is home made, common sense. Always make sure that someone is around when refining with aqua-regia as the fume if inhaled can knock you unconscious within seconds. Always make sure you have acid trauma kits on premises.

BE SAFE TO YOURSELF, OTHERS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Happy Urban Gold Mining

A. I will keep this short sweet and to the point for all of the people that are asking how to recover gold from any kind of computer and how much gold is in these computers and what is the gold worth! There are very many different ways to extract the gold! I won't go into detail on how to extract the gold since there are many different ways of doing it; I will let people know that I have scrapped out over 8,000 laptops! After extracting the gold from the laptop an older laptop from 1990 and prior you will extract 1 to 3 grams ... that is the simplest way to explain to people that have never done it! A high end laptop 1990 and prior and a low end laptop 1990 and prior will bring you like I said 1 to 3 grams of gold ... one last thing ... if you can pick up old laptops and tear them apart yourself you will make a lot more money! So to do the math on that if you were to get one gram of gold per laptop you and I need 28 laptops to make an ounce and if you were to get 3 grams of gold per laptop you would need around 9 laptops to get your ounce of gold! -- so a lot of the other answers on here as far as it not being profitable are incorrect.

A. I have been reclaiming gold with some silver, palladium and platinum from circuit boards for about 5 years now. I make a fairly comfortable income from doing it. I am prepared to give simple to read and follow instructions on how I do it provided you don't raid my suppliers of boards. The quantity of boards, etc., available to you will be your limiting factor.

I have never used mercury or cyanide and those that claim it as a means to recover gold know not of what they claim to know about.

If you are not prepared to put in the money to buy what you need to recover the precious metals or put in the time to process it then don't waste my time. You won't reclaim any gold without some cost and effort, this is the real world.

Anything you will need is available in most places or on the internet. My initial investment was about $1000 Australian but my production has increased from one furnace to three so it is all relative. The degree that you reclaim to, and so it's cash value, will depend on you, but you can readily sell low purity gold as easily as 24 carat gold.

I don't know the ins & outs of this site but it seems you can email me with a link in it so if you really want to try it out then I am prepared to explain how to go about it. Rocket science it is not but care must be taken doing it so don't blame me if you don't take precautions that I explain.

Hi Peter. Thanks; good info! If there are additional things that you are willing to freely & publicly share, we have all the room in the world -- please do so. If not, that's understandable too; all of us can share something we know, very few can share everything they know.

But we don't put people into personal contact for a long list of reasons, including the fact that it's rude to disenfranchise the readers by letting them see some of the discussion, then having it go private, cutting them adrift. If people accept our invitation for cocktails, we don't tell them to go home an hour later because they didn't make the dinner cut  🙂    Thanks again.

Regards,

A. Hi Katherine. I think the "mustard color" probably is tarnished gold plating. I'm not aware of anything more precious than gold being used, except perhaps a tiny amount of platinum, and that is silvery colored.

Regards,

! Hi, everyone. To extract your gold from motherboards is easy. Just go on youtube, type in "how to extract gold from computer motherboards" -- they have step by step videos of the whole process and what you need to do this. Good luck guys.

Thanks very much for the kind words, Tim.

Regards,

A. Hi Tim. They're probably tin plated. Tin used to be used on card edge connectors; but as electronics became smaller, lower voltage, lower current, and more complex, tin didn't offer the required low resistance and high reliability. I suppose they could be platinum or palladium or rhodium plated but I personally am not familiar with such a thing.

Regards,

A. Like Ted said, it is tin. For a year or two in the early 70's, Xerox used rhodium on their fingers but, since then, all the white fingers I've seen are tin. Silver isn't used because it has a tendency to migrate between the fingers and causes partial shorts.

A. From the forum where I am proud to be a moderator, goldrefiningforum.com, I find 2 different silver values for keyboard mylars. The first is $.20 per keyboard mylar and the second is 1.7%, or about $4 per pound of mylars at a $17.25 silver spot.

Concerning gold plating on electronics. On a part which can wear, through usage, such as gold-plated pins or circuit board fingers, the value would be about $0.38 per square inch of gold plated area, at a $1269 spot price for gold. This is about the thickest gold plating you'll normally find. For non-wear parts, such as the large gold plated plane area on a cell phone circuit board, the value is about %0.05 per square inch of gold plated area.

The bottom line is that the precious metals values on electronic scrap are quite low and you must process it in large quantities to show a profit. To do this chemically is normally not profitable unless you cherry-pick certain components from the boards and sell the boards that remain.

All of this has a long learning curve and it's very easy to get burned when you don't know exactly what you're doing.

I would estimate that about 95% of all the valid information found on the internet concerning precious metals scrap is on the forum listed above. It's been around for 9 years and has about 35,000 members. Several of us have done this professionally all of our lives - in my case, 50 years. Beware of other information sources, such as youtube videos. Many are quite dangerous and many are incomplete or just plain wrong.

A. Hi Scott. Gold is always gold colored and very few other things are. If you see no gold color on those boards, there is no gold. If you see gold color on the board (most likely on the edge connectors) it almost surely is gold. But the thickness of the gold plating is a very important factor in whether it is practical to try to recover the gold. Depending on the vintage of the boards, the thickness could probably be anything from 10 microns to 200 microns. That is, there might be twenty times as much gold on some edge connectors as on others.

Regards,

A. As a casual refiner, you will never make a nickel from refining circuit boards.