I thought, given that I’ve been active in the management of WEEE for some six odd years and have a plethora of experience (NVQ’s, Engineering Degrees to quantify) that it was time I blew the lid off the UK’s Urban Gold mining market- not the one’s plying their trade under the guise “we buy your Gold” or “Gold for cash”, but those offering a recycling solution for your old electronics (the ones with the silcon chips, processors and memory sticks.

There are a lot of “recyclers” out there, all plying their trade with a view to snapping up your old computers, mobile phones and anything with a circuit board in it, but where does all the supposed gold go to? I mean, even the biggest of recyclers offer UK based services for recycling WEEE.

Before we get down to the real shocking truth, lets do some grond work, chemistry style. There’s two processes used to extract gold from electronics. The first is via a chemical reaction, whereby circuit boards are first dissolved in nitric acid at 60% proof, this removes the silver, lead, copper, tin and zinc from the circtui boards. The fluid is seperated from the circuit boards and Salt used to “precipitate out” the silver from the mix. The silver falls as a white snow, setling on the bottom of the liquid as silver nitrate, a highly toxic compound that’s used for treating warts and developing photos. This can be turned back into silver by first filtering it and then heating it with bauxite to some 1300 degrees C.

The remaining circuit boards are then placed in a bath of Aqua Regia (Royal Water), a mixture of Nitric and Hyrochloric Acid (note that simply breathing in the fumes from this will irrecoverably damage your respiratory system). The gold dissolves in this liquid, leaving the original circuit boards which are now a waste byproduct. The gold is removed from the Aqua Regia by adding Sodium Metabichloride (Known as SMB)- also used to chemically sterilise fermenation equipment. The gold precipitates out as flakes that are then filtered out of the liquid. Without suitable precautions, this aforementioned process will most definately cause irrecoverable damage to your body and can lead to death.

The second method is just as convoluted and requires considerably higher levels of investment. It involves the smelting of circuit boards, burning off the boards themselves and fusing all metals together. These are then cast and rolled into a thin strip which is immersed in an electrolyte. With a suitable material placed at the other end of the bath, a current is passed from the metal strip (anode) through the electrolyte to the cathode, where specific metals are deposited, depending upon the composition of the cathode. This method recovers the copper, aluminium, zinc, gold and silver. It requires significant investment to set up.

So, the truth about the UK’s WEEE industry? To put it bluntly there isn’t a single Gold refiner in the UK extracting it from WEEE. There isn’t one legally registered with the Envinronment Agency and I very much doubt there will be for some time to come. All WEEE that is processed legitimately in the UK goes to a refiner in Holland, yep you got it, Holland, where it’s refined and benefits their economy. With the price of Gold rising each and every day, the only thing holding the UK back from having it’s own refinery is the prohibitive cost of setting one up. The environmental cost of such an operation would, in itself put pay to it, what with the duty to the Chancellor and the cost in Environmental Permits, let alone the costly environmental safeguards to prevent accidents, leaks- in effect the same issues that plagued now definct steelworks, mills and processors throughout the UK. So there you go, nearly all your waste WEEE circuit boards go to Holland (the legitimate stuff anyway)- the rest, well you’ve seen Panorama haven’t you?