Last summer I decided to clean my garage especially a lot of old electronic components I was unable to sell during the past 10 years. As I was fed up of this old stock, I was ready to throw it away. Well, I thought this is not a very ecological solution.
In this stock there was a lot of old reels of MLCC capacitors 1206 and 0805 from the 80s and the 90s (about 700.000 pcs of small capacitors).
After a few research on the web, I could learn that this old capacitors may contain precious metals like Palladium and Silver : but how much? how to make the recycling and where to sell this material?
At first a decided to pack them all out of the reels (about 600 reels) : this tooks a few days:
At the end of this process I could collect about 10kg of MLCC capacitors :
I thought maybe some specialized companies in recycling of e-waste will be interested in this bag : this first one located in France told me that I will be not very rich with that bag, he offered me 22 USD per Kilo. Well a few days later I sent an email to a US based e-waste company... they offered me 160 USD per pound !
Thanks to a few good videos posted on youtube, I slowly understood that this lot could contain about 1 to 2% of Palladium.
I found a laboratory near my home who was able to make an analysis by spectroscopy on a small sample of my bag :
I had to mill them as fine as possible :
.
A few days later cames the results :
1.8% Palladium and 3.8% Silver
that means my bag of capacitors has a value of around 10.000 USD !
Next step was to find a company in France who could recover the Palladium and the Silver from this bag : after a few days I finally found a good and honest one in France named "Morphosis".
They told me that they had a lot of work and that recovery process may take around 75 days. Just received their results today, and it match exactly the result from the previous analysis by spectroscopy : they could recover 170g of Palladium and 373g of Silver.
(1g of Palladium is about 60 USD value)
If you hold some capacitors .... think well !
Nice story
Nice story
Yay! 🤗
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