Extracting Silver From Electronic Waste

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hello friends, my name is Alex.

[00:00:02]In this video, I 'll show you how I extracted silver from trash using a chemical method.

[00:00:12]For eleven months now, I 've lived in a house that was filled with trash.

[00:00:17]Among all that trash were parts suitable for extracting silver and other precious metals.

[00:00:25]There were old televisions, radio receivers and circuit breakers with silver contacts here.

[00:00:31]I took it all apart for recycling.

[00:00:59]To start with, I 'm extracting the parts that contain silver.

[00:01:03]There are also parts that contain gold.

[00:01:05]There are much fewer of them, and I wo n't be processing them today.

[00:01:48]The most valuable part is the contacts.

[00:01:51]There are eighty grams of them, zero point seventeen pounds.

[00:01:56]To dissolve the contacts, I use nitric acid and distilled water, two to one.

[00:02:02]Two parts nitric acid, one part distilled water.

[00:03:21]I 've burned all the radio components.

[00:03:23]To wash the silver off them, I use distilled water and a bit of nitric acid.

[00:03:50]To speed up the dissolving process, I 'm putting everything on heat.

[00:04:07]Once the silver has dissolved, the solution needs to be filtered.

[00:04:11]I use mineral wool for the filter.

[00:04:38]After filtering the solution, you need to neutralize the nitric acid.

[00:04:42]I do this using sulfamic acid and I make my first mistake here, which results in me losing a little bit of silver.

[00:04:50]I added too much at once when I should have added it gradually.

[00:05:07]Next, I 'm precipitating silver chloride.

[00:05:09]I 'm doing this using hydrochloric acid.

[00:07:28]Next, I need to reduce the silver chloride into silver clay.

[00:07:32]I 'm doing this using hydrochloric acid and aluminum.

[00:07:39]I think I made some mistakes while reducing the silver chloride, too.

[00:07:44]It 's forgivable for the first time.

[00:09:13]After reducing the silver chloride, I washed everything several times and dried it.

[00:09:21]I 'm adding citric acid to the water so I can drop the hot silver in later and clean off the borax.

[00:09:54]I probably made some mistakes while melting the silver as well. It 's my first time doing this, too.

[00:10:29]This little piece of silver was made from radio components.

[00:10:44]This is the main bulk of the silver clay that was obtained from the contacts.

[00:11:05]I made a mistake here as well.

[00:11:07]This amount should have been divided into three or four parts and melted in batches.

[00:12:06]On the first try, I was n't able to properly melt a large piece of silver.

[00:12:46]I tried again the next day.

[00:12:48]I placed a gas burner underneath and used two soldering torches to heat it from the top.

[00:12:53]Everything worked out.

[00:13:49]Friends, thank you so much for watching the video.

[00:13:52]A big thank you to the sponsors for their memberships and for supporting me.

[00:13:57]See you in the next video.