Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > Selling gold off motherboards

[Ozz]

I am currently in the process of buying an office property with some friends.

It used to be a firm called Aeon Communications which did PCs etc.

The place is stacked out with motherboards and parts etc although my PC friend reckons there is little actually useable for modern PCs (over 3 years old and fairly specific build stuff).

However someone said to me that the gold and possibly copper could be taken off the boards and sold for scrap. Is this true?? Anyone now the values etc....?

[swannymere]

I know of someone who does this for a 'living' you need ton's to make any money,is it worth it?He has a helicopter in his garden

[Ozz]

Oooh. Well this building has thousands of the boards and bits...

[chicken]

Gold is currently about $580 a troy ounce. This makes a 12.5kg gold brick (like you see in the movies) worth around $230,000.

In a former life I once did a stocktake of the precious metals inventory (bullion and coins) for a rather large Swiss bank. They were in the process of consolidating the three main vaults into one new big vault the size of two football pitches in the centre of Zurich.

I remember thinking at the time that one gold bar was worth the same as the house that I had just bought, and the pallet it was in was the equivalent to my street. I was there for 3 weeks so you can imagine how many pallets there were!

The best bit though was the 6 cannisters of granulated rhodium, each the size of a large thermos. When I asked how much each one was worth, the casual reply was "about $2m dollars. We keep meaning to transfer them into nicer containers but we don't want to spill it!"

Back to the point - they might be worth something Paul but the cost to extract it would be too high to make it worthwhile.

[antonye]

If it comes down to getting rid of them, it may be worth seeking a local charity or school that may be able to make some use of them rather than sticking them in a skip?

[doogalman]

Get the pikeys to take it away.

[Ozz]

Chi I will importing Venezualan dwarves to get the gold off so should be cheap...

If it comes down to it I will get hold of a local charity although what use they could make of it is beyond me....

[Jools]

Getting the gold off the boards might seem like a good idea for a get rich quick scheme, but like everything else it ain't that easy.

Salvaging scrap PCB's can be a resonable business if you salvage zillions of them (like Swannymere's mate with the helicopter in the garden) but you actually need expensive plant to do it effectively. Printed Circuit Boards are actually difficult to dispose of effectively because it's illegal to put them directly into landfill in most countries, you can't burn them without expensive furnaces because they give of toxic fumes. I think that the favoured method is currently to strip out all the recyclables and then grind the boards up into powder that can be chemically treated to make it inert for landfill,

[antonye]

Originally Posted by Ozz

If it comes down to it I will get hold of a local charity although what use they could make of it is beyond me....

Not everybody needs the latest computers and some of it may come in handy for spares/replacements or even for teaching purposes. They can always say no!

[chris.p]

Spoke to a refurb pc company in Chesterfield a few months back, they all go to China, seems the laws are a bit more lax over there



Chris