This bar of gold came from the trash in fact the materials inside the electronics thrown out every year are worth an estimated $60 billion there's plaum there's tantalum there's tin there's lead there's steel to extract the most precious metals you usually need brute force or a powerful Acid.
Bath in many places the Scavengers who process E-Waste can't afford proper safety measures so now a growing number of solo recyclers are proving they can make money by safely handling it in their own garages we could potentially recycle all of our e-w domestically instead of exporting it overseas Wade collie is a.
Dumpster diver on a mission to keep Electronics out of landfills his work led him to partner with a startup that grinds the circuit boards he collects and recovers metals from them using a secret brew that comes from nature some of it's microbial some of it's fungal so how much money do solo.
Scrappers really make and can they change the way the global ew trade works we went to Sydney Australia to find out everyone knows when Wade collie is coming through town nicknames it flash because it's red and it's electric and it buzzles around everywhere today he's on his way to a local repair shop that puts aside devices it can't fix they.
Didn't really have a way of recycling things and they really wanted to over the past decade electronic waste around the world has grown by at least 60% as of 2019 it's over 50 million metric tons of trash every year Wade Works alone breaking down with drills screwdrivers and these are actually electric Garden pruners but I have repurposed them to be.
Able to cut through uh cable doing this work comes with risks but Wade takes precautions uh so I have to put my respirator on to take these fluorescent tubes out because if they break they contain mercury inside of them which is obviously poison after a few minutes of work he finally uncovers the treasure he's after so this is the.
Uh main circuit board and this is where all the gold and silver uh is in all the little uh black chips Wade Works to ensure that every part of a device is properly handled even the hard to recycle plastic recovering the copper gold and Palladium inside circuit boards is possible at massive recycling facilities.
But it's expensive and requires corporations and consumers to properly dispose of their devices today only about 9% of E-Waste in Australia is formally collected the US is only slightly better at 15% so unwanted Tech piles up on the curb waiting for Treasure Hunters to find it all right there's another nice.
Board I Envision that small recyclers and Scrappers are going to continue to grow as a Force both within the United States and a lot of other developed countries Ernie Petri is a retired Navy Captain who started scrapping in 2019 his YouTube channel shark Scrapper is one of hundreds teaching people about this business every minute that you.
Spend scrapping stuff down is eating way into your margin and sometimes you might only make uh you know a couple bucks an hour on something if you're just doing this as a oneperson operation out of the back of your truck you'd be better off to just go work at McDonald's scrapping doesn't really pay off until you can invest in heavy duty.
Equipment that can cost tens of thousands of dollars when you put it on one of our shaker tables the metals go one way and the waste goes another way Jason gabber comes from the world of underground mining but now he sells Crushers that can be used for E-Waste E-Waste is going to be the rich just or.
Of the future for many Es scrapping remains a side Hustle but for some of the world's poorest people it's the only way to make a living every year rich countries ship thousands of tons of ewaste to places like Delhi India a world capital of unregulated E-Waste recycling gar was 14 when we talked to.
Him in 2023 he's one of about 50,000 people who scavenge here mostly from piles imported from countries like the United States and China gzar starts his morning selling breakfast at his father's food cart after school he heads to trash piles like this one to sort through old cell phones computers and video game.
Controllers few people doing this work have access to gloves or other safety and to get at the valuable Metals many scavengers burn E-Waste that's a problem that experts say has long lasting impacts on human health including stunted growth miscarriages organ damage and bone density loss in 2021 India recycled a third of the 1.5 million.
Metric tons of ewaste It produced a recycling rate about twice that of North America but only a fraction of Indian waste was handled by authorized recyclers not to mention the country Imports an estimated 50,000 metric tons of E-Waste each year with his business rekindle me Wade's trying to prevent e-w from.
Getting shipped overseas it would have a really good impact globally If instead of expor it overseas and putting it on the less fortunate being able to take care of our own waste today Wade's dropping off a truckload of materials he's collected at mint Innovation a local startup that grinds circuit.
Boards hey wa how's it going hello good thanks for coming past look like a nice couple of batches here you brought past mint pays him about $350 per kilo so today he made about $3500 how much did you bring along today uh one tunnel together typically we're going to get something like I don't know um 250 300 kilos of copper could be in.
There and maybe you know anything from 100 to 200 g of gold we'll see where we get to with that um but I've got a a weird sample here of gold from the processor I'll give it to you now as a down payment maybe you have to give it back but uh mint runs electronic waste through a liquid bath of bacteria fungi.
And other organic materials Business Insider first visited mints pilot facility in New Zealand in 2021 now the company scaled up with a facility here in Sydney Australia that's nearly five times bigger so this is our first plant uh and what we are gearing up is being able to build these in multiple cities around the world it's.
It's almost entirely automated preventing workers from coming into direct contact with hazardous materials the circuit boards heading up the two-story conveyor belt contain about 70% Plastics and 30% metals like copper silver padium and gold this machine crushes them into smaller particles which will then be dissolved in liquid.
We got a big plastic tank behind me here uh it's 25,000 L it'll sit in this mixing tank for a few hours after that it'll be sent over to one of the filter presses this blue fluid contains a high concentration of copper tin and other less valuable Metals mint uses electricity to pull out the copper we simply put that through a.
Series of plates pass it over that that have electric current flowing through them and that plates out the Copper from solution now the solution is ready to extract the gold that's where min special sauce comes in mint's team identified these tiny helpers in 2017 through a series of research trips to places like abandoned.
Mines or Fields with Rusty equipment they collected species of bacteria and fungi that evolv to bond with specific Metals so you can see this residual dark purple color that's leftover biomass that's got the gold stack to it and that's formed these beautiful purple Nano particles the.
Purple cake will go to an off-site refiner to be turned into something easier to recognize so this gold bar that I'm holding in my hands is about 1.2 1.3 kilos uh and that's the amount of gold that this facility is recovering each day it's an operation at today's prices that's nearly $85,000 worth of gold the company says.
Its Sydney plant could recover more than $30 million of gold every year mint also says its process has a smaller environmental footprint compared to other forms of industrial recycling what we've created is a closed loop system where what actually leaves the plant is benign uh and not a a chemical waste stre that's what helped convince Wade to.
Process his treasures here it feels amazing to see that my circuit boards have finally made it to the right place and I know they're being recycled proper and it's really cool to see it all in place now Wade started collecting old electronics when he was just a teen he'd store them in his mom's garage and i' I'd constantly say way do you do.
You think there's a way of you know condensing this a little bit just so that we can walk get out the front door this is a 1960s uh TV made in Australia this was my first old laptop or piece of technology that kind of started my obsession with just any anything vintage and electrical and stuff like that yeah I just like to Tinker on them and um see.
If I can get them working again I think it's important as a historical standpoint to keep things like this because there's getting less and less by the day of these older systems and yeah they're actually worth far more than the gold and silver inside of them in my opinion but Wade may want to consider mining some of his own collection ever.
Heard they don't build them like they used to well it's true starting in the late '90s many companies began using goldplated wiring instead of solid gold to lower costs for example integrated circuits from a 1982 IBM PC now sell for about $180 a pound an apple CPU something you'd find.
Inside a neon iMac from 20 years later only fetches about $4 a pound most of the computer uh Hardware is not that valuable um there is of course going to be some gold some copper some Platinum some padium but minute amounts environmental activist Jim Pucket started the basil Action Network or ban in.
1997 to Monitor and stop illegal exporting of hazardous trash like ewaste we need to think of handling our waste as a service to society because we don't want to be trashed with waste we don't want pollution Wade says his business will continue to earn a modest income until he can invest in new equipment but doing the right.
Thing is what keeps him going motivates me in knowing that it's actually going to be recycled and not going to landfill and then my hobby kind of feeds into that cuz you know I when I get old stuff I quite enjoy that so it's yeah it's a really good feeling job for me
These 5th world international locations are burning this shit. On the issues the native weather apes are restful when even I be taught about how toxic this is.
Let's hide the abilities from everybody! Secret brew by secret shrew.
Why shouldwe smartly dispose it after they don’t even portion the profits of that gold with us.