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Re: MTH ran great!
Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2023 8:51 am
by Rufus T. Firefly
healey36 wrote:When I worked for Hughes, we had a scrap deal with a local outfit that recovered precious metals from junk printed circuit boards. I don't recall what the numbers looked like, but it was certainly lucrative enough that folks went through the effort to extract materials from old boards. It was also my understanding that the process was fairly toxic, having to deal with high levels of lead and mercury as well (there were some also pretty serious waivers for the recyclers to provide that assured proper handling and disposal).
I used to have a copy of a published paper from one of the chem journals that analyzed the amounts and values of all the components of those pallets of surplus junk computers that were going back to China where all the precious metals and the other were recovered. To my mind at that time the numbers were staggeringly large. We keep buying the same stuff over and over that's being recycled, re-processed, etc.
Re: MTH ran great!
Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2023 1:44 pm
by healey36
Rufus T. Firefly wrote:We keep buying the same stuff over and over that's being recycled, re-processed, etc.
Probably better than newly-mined/refined stuff in the long-run.
Re: MTH ran great!
Posted: Thu Mar 02, 2023 2:02 pm
by Rufus T. Firefly
healey36 wrote:Rufus T. Firefly wrote:We keep buying the same stuff over and over that's being recycled, re-processed, etc.
Probably better than newly-mined/refined stuff in the long-run.
A firm maybe....
Re: MTH ran great!
Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2023 9:56 am
by healey36
Rufus T. Firefly wrote:healey36 wrote:Rufus T. Firefly wrote:We keep buying the same stuff over and over that's being recycled, re-processed, etc.
Probably better than newly-mined/refined stuff in the long-run.
A firm maybe....
Sarge has shared with me some images of Chinese rare-earth mining and that's a frightening spectacle to behold. Definitely a "not in my backyard" moment.
Re: MTH ran great!
Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2023 1:04 pm
by Rufus T. Firefly
healey36 wrote:Rufus T. Firefly wrote:healey36 wrote:Probably better than newly-mined/refined stuff in the long-run.
A firm maybe....
Sarge has shared with me some images of Chinese rare-earth mining and that's a frightening spectacle to behold. Definitely a "not in my backyard" moment.
Used to use a lot of Gd(III) in my labs.....and purifying lanthanides and actinides even at the micro scale is messy.
Yes, mining and refining all of them is a "messy thing", but we have not got a lot here and only the one mining operation that's failed repeatedly; new firm started up a few years ago, but guess what - their refining site is in China.
Re: MTH ran great!
Posted: Sat Mar 04, 2023 6:09 pm
by healey36
Reminds me of the old Firesign Theater bit, “Trilobites, chigger-bites, and mosquitos collided aimlessly in the dense cloud.”