Silver recovery from computer keyboards - slideshow

[makeithappen552]

Archon808, you may want to rethink...silver is over $36 today. Lots of pros see it going to $50 and higher this year. I'll take all the silver I can find. You should consider doing scrap4treasure. They show about 15 different sources of silver and, although it's true that one item has very little, some like microwaves have a lot. Good luck.

[piffwiff]

Table salt works just as well as Hcl to precipitate AgCl. It makes AgCl and NaNo3. It handles a bit easier than the Hcl. Great Video!

[archon808]

Spend hours, and money to recover pennies worth of silver !!!

[indeedItdoes]

@archon808

"Spend hours, and money to recover pennies worth of silver !!!"

OR, TO HAVE A GREAT HOBBY...

No need to be so narrow minded !!!

Peace !!!

[ladydog72]

Not worth it to me but thanks for video.

[kranbork]

voy a hacerlo

[bw110698]

What is silver choride any way I have those things for keyboards but idk what the stuff is

[indeedItdoes]

@bw110698

Silver chloride is a salt.

Made out of Silver and Chlorine.

[markjoachen]

sounds a bit dodgy to me and i have no skin on my hands now really dont do this unless you want no skin and no eyes its not like you need eyes anyway

[Mr71seventyone1]

i used chlorine water and acid [hno3] first grey ppt is formed spongy like your video end and after the remaining water i added nacl it turned into white colour water i used only key board scrap one and nothing help me what is gray ppt? and white water formed later?

[indeedItdoes]

@Mr71seventyone1

you are producing silver chloride.

Let everything settle, decant and treat accordingly.

[Mr71seventyone1]

@indeedItdoes nothing settled down i used zinc it helped black ppt of zinc and greyish ppt came down well thank you your videos help me a lot

[shinyfuzzy]

wtf keyboard is that???

[poofnsauce]

@shinyfuzzy it's the key contact sheet that's inside all computer keyboards

[AGDemo]

@shinyfuzzy lol

[epohnopulse]

Ever consider using some currents?

[indeedItdoes]

@epohnopulse

Hi

Yes i did actually.

Thing is, to deplete the solution with current you need some very unreactive anode, such as graphite or platinized titanium or.... Silver :)

When come to thing about it, Silver is the best choise, since you practically making it into an electrolytic silver refining cell...

OR

To just precipitate the silver chmically...

[burgosmatthew]

Just and FYI, instead of messing with my HCL you can instead just take some clean copper and suspend it in the silver nitrate solution, the copper will replace the silver and the silver will drop out to the bottom. However, the nitric acid needs to be saturated with silver for this to work, otherwise the nitric acid will re-dissolve the silver.

[indeedItdoes]

@burgosmatthew

Please explain your logic:

Your are saying to take a pure silver nitrate solution and contaminate it with Copper ?

There are many other ways... I have a series on silver coming up soon, some will tuch this very subject as well. STAY TUNED. :)

Sam

[burgosmatthew]

@indeedItdoes I guess my first question is, what proof do you have the silver coming off the mylars is 999 pure?

[indeedItdoes]

@burgosmatthew

That's easy, just read spec sheets.

Look at the color of the solution... add lye and see if something precipitate...

[indeedItdoes]

@burgosmatthew

After the silver is out, that is...

[burgosmatthew]

@indeedItdoes And why not just use table salt rather than the HCL. The reason the silver is precipitating out is because of the chloride, right?

[indeedItdoes]

@burgosmatthew

correct sir. table salt is a viable option

Pesonally, I wouldn't use table salt in such case as it may not be clean enough.

[robinrwilsonsauls]

I need information on buying the chemicals- could you provide information of where to purchase these items. TY

To let you know for someone looking to find means to fund other adventures/Inventions, it's worth the investment!

[1rought]

Home depot is fresh out of nitric acid..otherwise I would be all over that..

[MrAlmunawar]

thanks dear its 100%n working pleas upload gold recycling video of compurts components.

[indeedItdoes]

@MrAlmunawar

I'm glad it's working out for ya.

Good luck.

[na2kase]

i find it interesting but will it work out i mean with the mylars say 25 to 30 u get 5 grams so still confused

[senseblogger]

ok so it's less than mini wage BUT yo how many people do YOU know in your araea that DON't Even make mini wage they make zero ! SO $5 an hour is better than ZERO and if you do this 8 hrs a day thats $40 per dya X 5 days = $200 a week tax free CASH ! PLUS what other metals you can get from these parts aluminumn and copper and copper is up to highest ever average $3.50 a lb

[Mr71seventyone1]

how to melt it down help me out with a video

[victorsasami]

woah... that coca cola bottle is from some other country? where are yuo from??? :P

[indeedItdoes]

@victorsasami

Planet Mars :)

[rafraf77]

i guess it pays better to collect bottles or alu cans lol

[proaerro]

i looked up silver costs, 4.5 grams of silver is about 5 bucks, so congrats, 5 dollars for that effort, which prolly took over an hour maybe? now true you made profits because you used so little of the chemicals, but your still making 3-6.5 dollars an hour, which is less then minimum wage, correct me if im wrong.

[indeedItdoes]

@proaerro

This demonstration took about 20 minutes, cutting the mylars and removing the silver.

This demonstration only come to show the processs aand reaction and can be improved to be much more efficient, say, processing the whole mylar for example.

The Avarage yield is about 0.4-0.6 grams for each duble mylar keyboard... again, there's no point in relying on exact numbers here, but i'm very certain in my ballpark numbers (0.4-0.6 per keyboard).

you can manually run many mylars in one hour.

[proaerro]

@indeedItdoes @proaerro i guess thats not AS bad but where exactly would one even find all those keyboards, and youd have to get them for free also.. from what ive read on the cost of gold, id be going for that heh. cost of gold per same weight is about 50x that of silver. or maybe it was 10, i forgot, either way?  getting rid of all the keyboard corpses would suck too, and all the other trash, i know its not meant to make you rich or anything so yea id just do what makes you happy.

[proaerro]

@indeedItdoes i did not intend to flame or say your wrong i think this is a GREAT instructional video. i watched it to learn the process anyway not to learn how to make money so it worked out heh.

[indeedItdoes]

@proaerro

Sure man, i understand. Thank you for the compliments.

I'm in a full agreement with you, dealing with gold is much more lucrative, at almost every perspective.

Ideally, one would fine where to sell his plastic, given a large amount, other wise trash it.

I wish you good luck woth your gold adventure.

[rossi2013]

@proaerro

Perhaps he is just wanting to show people how it can be done and not for the money value.

[AGDemo]

@rossi2013 Amen!

[chessmaster001]

@proaerro I'm waiting for the video to load, but correct me if I'm wrong - 1 keyboard would be worth about 5 bucks right? well, if you can just keep getting tons of old key boards, say 200, and do them all (or you start one, then the other, etc) you would go from profiting 3-6.5 dollars an hour, to about 500 dollars an hour :) also, I'm pretty sure this method would work with other silvers, maybe maybe not

[falls0ft]

@proaerro You can process a plenty of mylars at the same time as most of the process is just waiting, could kick your per hour payout up by a lot.

[TWSceptic]

@proaerro I seriously don't get these guys doing this. Maybe when silver is 50x the price it is now it'll make sense.

[poligon333]

 I heard that Old x-ray negatives used in hospitals are a good source of silver

[indeedItdoes]

@poligon333

Indeed it does :)

[Robbob9933]

@poligon333 Also old microform (film and fiche) masters.

[ralbiruni]

good job, well explained! You also can treat the silver nitrate solution with ammonia and pour it in a inverted sugar solution.

it will done a metallic miror of pure silver.

[indeedItdoes]

@ralbiruni

Thanks for the input sir.

Thought, i gotta say, on the next big batch i'll probably just precipitate Ag2O with NaOH and then stright to meting.

There's no other elements dissolved in this process so that should be pretty easy and fast

[powerbuy21]

I have seen several comments on here claiming 175 keyboards per ounce. This is not correct from my experience. I have owned a computer recycling business for 8 years and average an ounce per 60 or 70 keyboards, or about a half gram per keyboard. You must remember that there are two silver mylars in each keyboard. I collect between 5,000 and 10,000 mylars. It takes several days with much larger containers and nitric volumes. On my last batch I ended up with 118.4 troy ounces of .99 silver.

[indeedItdoes]

@powerbuy21

Thanks for sharing your expirience.

My yield and yours are pretty much the same. If you notice, i wrote (in the video) that 24-26 MYLARS= 4.5g Ag.

that equals to about and once per 86 keyboards, of course, as you showed, this figure will fluctuate on each expirience, so i'd say 60-70 Keyboards are right around the ball park.

Btw, with those amounts, have you considered direct melting?

it can be a great time saver if you have the capabilities to safly burn off the plastic.

[intrptr]

The world turns on metals Every thing we use is either made of metal or was made in metal factories. Cow milking machines and forestry products and oil refineries and tractors and cars and bread baking ovens use metal, period. Unless you have coins or ingots of refined metal stamped as such, you have SCRAP metal and will only receive a bottom price for selling to a scrap yard. Sorry...

[intrptr]

You might have more luck reclaiming larger amounts of silver (and less trash) from plated items such as cutlery and jewelry. Even the base metal can be sold to scrapyards. So goto fleamarkets and buy up old silver plates or costume jewelry at pennies on the lb. and start with that, not tons of old keyboards and gararge chemistry.

[intrptr]

175 Disassembled keyboards (think about that) time and trash costs.. @ 1 Troy ounce of sivler recovered with this process and refined to relatively pure AG. At "melt" price you get 30 % of NY spot. about15.00. pffft

[indeedItdoes]

@intrptr

30% of spot.. ? you are being ripped off.

[intrptr]

@indeedItdoes Your "relatively pure" silver is not refined and AS IS can only fetch what is called a "melt" price, i.e. , that whomever buys this silver from you in the chloride state will have to refine it to purity which costs and therefore reduces the value at sale. Even If you refine it to a lump of 98-99% you are not a mint or refinery with accredited status for producing ingots. You could sell to your friends as jewelry or paperweight but there is no guarantee of purity on your part. sorry

[indeedItdoes]

@intrptr

You obviously know a thing or two about metals, but not enough apparently.

Did you really thought i'm suggesting anyone to sell AgCl ?? are you out of your mind?

The keyboards thing is a nice freebie from the e-scrap stream, and that's the way i treat them.

It is then forward to the silver refining cycles.

You know nothing about me, but i can tell you that, refined (99.95) and unmarked silver brings me 95% of spot.

I left you dirty language out, trolls are not wanted here.

[ontariobuds]

so is this a step by step or did you leave out something? silver chloride, once you extract it, that is pure, or near pure silver? you just dried it, melt it, and form it?

[indeedItdoes]

@ontariobuds

The conversion of silver chloride to elemental is a whole different story.

There are other ways other then silver chloride which will be described later.

[IamMagPie]

Is the value of the silver extracted higher than the cost of the chemicals used?

[indeedItdoes]

@IamMagPie

Hi, 100ml of dilute nitric acid (35%) can dissolve about 1.6 Ozt of silver, removing the the silver from solution with scrap copper or salt is almost without costs.

Now you can do the math'. Don't forget labor.

[nbelcher7]

where can you get all these chemicals?

[indeedItdoes]

@nbelcher7

Chemical supply shops, i is very depends on your location in the globe though.

[nbelcher7]

how to you melt the powder down?

[27simber]

what is the % on the hydrogen peroxide you use....

[indeedItdoes]

@27simber

3%

[AssholeBlogger]

I have a pile of old electronics, thanks to being a packrat that never throws anything away,, old PCS, dvd players, cell phones, keyboards, etc... someday, I plan on getting all the precious metals out of them... I wonder, anything good inside old CRT monitors?

[indeedItdoes]

@AssholeBlogger

Good luck with that adventure, now you know how to start when you will :)

CRT = Some copper, big headache

[voteforronpaul2008]

@AssholeBlogger Be extremely careful if you crack open a CRT. The capacitors in a CRT can seriously injure or even kill you. They can hold a charge for months, if not years. I haven't actually messed with CRTs for that very reason. That being said, I would assume that you would find a transformer and possibly a bridge rectifier in there if you ventured to go ahead with opening it up, and you could conceivably sell those to electronics hobbyists.

[marc0987654321]

Thanks for making this. This is great info! I'd love to get a lot smarter with all of this stuff, but just now started thinking about this.

[sfholton]

You say to use the transparent mylars that have the silver on the surface is there a way to distinguish which ones the are? Name brand? Style, or year? Thanx your videos are great!

[indeedItdoes]

@sfholton

Thank you.

If the contact points are white/gray it's silver.

If black, it's carbon.

They still make them with silver these days...

[zalida100]

Very nice video. Thanks very much. Very interesting information.

[MercuryReliance]

24 - 26 mylars? Does that mean you sacrificed 24 - 26 keyboards or are there more than one mylar in a keyboard? I have never taken one apart before. According to your work, you would net $193 at today's spot price. How long did this process take? I appreciate your response - thanks!

[indeedItdoes]

@MercuryReliance

Usually it's two Mylars per keyboard. this batch, if memory serves me correctly was 13-14 keyboards.

i don't know what you calculation is, but 4.5 GRAMS of silver worth at today spot (45.23) 6.54$.

the process is relatively quick, each dip of Mylar only takes 1-2 seconds.

[MercuryReliance]

@MercuryReliance Oops... little details, like grams vs. ounces, can make a big difference, eh?! Hmmmm... 12 keyboards X 2 seconds = 24 seconds X $6.54 = approximately $13.00 per minute = $780.00 per hour X 8 hours per day X 5 days per week = $31,200/week X (52 weeks per year - 2 weeks holiday) = $1,560,000.00a

Good grief... I can see a real opportunity here.

[indeedItdoes]

@MercuryReliance

lol

I wish it was that straight forward...

If you could supply yourself with thousands of keyboards per week, you should also take into account disassemble time, refining time and materials costs.

If i ware to recover thousands of Mylars per week, i would chop them, incinerate (ashing) and melt in large capacity (50-100 kg) crucible.

[acuriousbeast]

I want to thank you very much for making this information available.

[toothpick93]

dude, intresting video but the downside is... ITS BORING you need to have either talking or shorter subtitles, i couldnt even watch teh whole thing becuase i got bored, to make it better, add music to it, use a video camera instead of a still frame image... some tips you should consider

[indeedItdoes]

@toothpick93

Thank you for your suggestions. I'll bare them in mind for my nest videos.

I only made two slide shows so far.

My editing skills sucks, to that, you can add that English is not my main language so I'm a bit reluctant to speak on my videos, but i might try it :)

Thanks.

Sam

[toothpick93]

@indeedItdoes your welcome, yeah in my vids, i have a stutter so i dont do talking in my videos so i use subs and music

[horlacsd]

One should get thousands of mylars per 'batch'...

[indeedItdoes]

@horlacsd

And your point is... ?

[flownder28]

Did you use a piece of Zinc to transform the Silver Chloride back?

[indeedItdoes]

@flownder28

Aluminum actually...but zinc or iron will also work fine

[Ketuh]

silver companies will go bankrupt

[Robbob9933]

Would this process work for any plastic substrate with silver on it?

[indeedItdoes]

@Robbob9933

Most plastics type do not react to nitric acid, so i can say it's fairly safe to say yes.

One should always do a test sample first though.

Good luck

[ToweringInfernoOrch]

thank you very good information, but isn't 4 g about $4.00?

[indeedItdoes]

@ToweringInfernoOrch

Yes, even less then than 4$, but one most consider silver recovery for the benefits it has for other gold refining process, like inquarting.

[YvogaAZ]

Thank you for the lesson!!!

[thaibu]

Hint: use table salt inplace of HCl, it neutralizes the acids too.

[indeedItdoes]

Thank you thaibu for your comment.

i know that, but i prefer using HCL since table salt sometime may contain impurities.

it will work, but i have acces to a very cheap CP HCL.

[metalicmario]

@indeedItdoes

I also find that table salt doesnt ever seem to get all the chloride out no matter how much you add. I sometimes add salt as the primary and then HCL to get the last remaining traces of chloride. Using salt can keep volume down though.

[patnor1011]

yep. I second that.

[aflacglobal]

Very nice :)