Dell Coalition Produces Gold From Discarded Electronic Devices

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): The collaboration between technology giant Dell Inc., and McKinney, Texas-based Wistron GreenTech recycles gold from end-of-life electronic devices and use them in its products. The pilot of the closed-loop gold recycling process has proved to be a great success, Dell press release noted.

Since the beginning of the current year, Dell has been running a pilot project that uses gold recycled from waste motherboards in the manufacture of its Latitude 5285 2-in-1 business-use notebook. The feasibility studies conducted earlier on server motherboards had revealed that closed-loop gold recycling could create millions of new motherboards, thereby expanding its closed-loop program for plastics recycling to also include precious metals.

The gold-recycling process is implemented as a two-stage process. In the first phase, the recycled e-waste collected from various sources is shipped to Wistron’s Texas facility where they are dismantled. The hydrometallurgical process at the plant leads to extraction of precious metals including gold, silver and copper from printed circuit boards. In the second phase, the waste chassis plastic is sent to Wistron’s processing facility in China for further processing and recovery.

Incidentally, Dell targets to use 100 million pounds of recycled materials in its products by 2020. Since 2012, Dell has recycled more than 50 million pounds of post-consumer recycled materials into new products.