The mobile phone you used to use is either broken or thrown away or disposed of at a low price? Recently, it has been revealed on the Internet that there is gold in your motherboard. Is it true or false? Let's take a look with Xiaobian~
At more than 11 o'clock in the night, Zhang Xiaozhen unloaded the goods with his brothers in the brightly lit company. Hundreds of thousands of used mobile phones recovered from all over the country came to their transit station.
Zhang Xiaozhen, a post-80s entrepreneur, has been in the field of used mobile phones for nearly ten years. His company in Fuzhou handles more than 7-8 million used mobile phones every year, and there are 800-1000 mobile phones in every sack in the warehouse. Workers on the assembly line will preliminarily disassemble the mobile phone, skillfully pry open the back cover of the mobile phone, separate the battery, pull out the SIM card and memory card, and then throw the conveyor belt of the return water line. Each person handles 7000-8000 mobile phones a day.
Here, you will be threatened by a large number of used mobile phones, ranging from the 1990s to recent years. In the eyes of practitioners, the more 'Antique' mobile phones are, the more valuable they are. A batch of mobile phones in the 1990s can be described as' first-class goods', because the process of manufacturing mobile phones in the early years was relatively rough, and only a relatively large number of precious metals could be used to 'lock' the signal and ensure normal communication.
Mobile phones can remove gold, silver and copper. In fact, many other electronic products can. It is impossible that the market driven by interests can not be seen, which gives birth to China's amazing scale e-waste industry chain.
'City Mine': huge industrial chain behind e-waste
E-waste industry chain involves front-end and back-end. Take the waste mobile phone as an example, the front end of the recycling network all over the country, before the Internet was popularized, most of them were vendors in cities and towns, recycling waste electrical appliances through the streets. After purchasing, the small vendors in cities and towns gather in the hands of the large merchants at the provincial level, carry out sorting, and then circulate to suppliers with different needs. In recent years, online recycling channels have begun to make efforts. Brands such as AI recycle and AI exchange have acquired a large number of used mobile phones, gradually occupying the main market.
Different quality of used mobile phones will flow to different channels in the middle and back end of the industrial chain. Mobile phones that can continue to be used will circulate to Huaqiang (23.580, 0.14, 0.60%) and other places in Shenzhen, and will be sold again as second-class mobile phones or refurbished phones. Some of the discarded mobile phones will be purchased by large-scale back-end processing companies for metal refining, and the refined precious metals will be sold to deep-processing enterprises. In addition, a large part of them will be distributed to many private workshops in Shantou, Guiyu and other places for dismantling, and the circuit boards will be handed over to the back-end workshops for refining.
So how much 'real gold and silver' can be extracted from a ton of used mobile phones? Zhang Xiaozhen told reporters that taking a batch of used mobile phones 5-10 years ago as an example, 200-300g gold, 1000-3000g silver, 100kg copper, and several to tens of grams of palladium and platinum can be extracted from a ton of used mobile phones. In traditional contract mining, the gold content of a ton of gold ore is only 15-20g. In contrast, the gold content of a ton of used mobile phones is much higher than that of gold ore.
E-waste, represented by waste mobile phones, is called "urban mine".
Big alchemists import more than ten kilos of gold a day: a small town that claims to control the international gold price
Guiyu, located in the south of Shantou, has been known as "the first town of e-waste dismantling" for the past 20 years. A complete industrial chain is entrenched in this small town with a local population of only 200000, accompanied by a series of words such as' pollution 'and' the most poisonous place in the world '.
E-waste, which can extract precious metals, means considerable wealth, which makes Guiyu people see business opportunities. In the words of Zhang Xiaozhen, in Guiyu, most of the people who first joined the industry and insisted on it have become 'friends of wealth'. Even if you don't work for a long time, this is still a place where you can make quick money and dig the first bucket of gold.
In the early years, 'imported foreign waste' was the main force of raw materials in Guiyu. In the 1990s, China's electronic products were not yet popular, and its consumption capacity was far less than that of developed countries. Developed countries have the demand to transfer pollution industries, and the price of e-waste from abroad is low. A large amount of e-waste is imported into the small counties along the southeast coast of China through illegal channels. Guiyu is one of the representatives.
Industry insiders told reporters that 20 years ago, 70-80% of the e-waste in Guiyu was smuggled by means of entrainment and border transshipment. In the early years, many Chinese went abroad to purchase e-waste from all over the world and then transport it back to China. After more and more people focus on this fat meat, the purchase price of e-waste is pushed up, and the profit of refining precious metals is depressed, making the price advantage of imported waste no longer obvious in the past decade.
In fact, there is a written regulation in China that electronic waste is not allowed to be imported from the customs. In the catalogue of prohibited import of solid waste, including waste batteries, waste mechanical and electrical products and equipment, as well as parts and components, broken parts, etc. that have not been sorted and processed, except as otherwise stipulated by the state, are all in the catalogue of prohibited import.
Since the 1990s, the vast majority of local fiscal revenue has come from the dismantling industry, and the local government also supports the development of the dismantling industry. This is also one of the important reasons for the development of e-waste industry in Guiyu and other places. There are data reality, dismantling industry once accounted for more than 90% of Guiyu's GDP, more than 100000 people engaged in this industry.
According to Zhang Xiaozhen's estimation, just take the waste mobile phones as an example. At present, Guiyu's monthly processing capacity is about 10 million units, with 120 million units a year, totaling about 10000-20000 tons. Based on 200g of gold per ton of used mobile phones, 2-4 tons of gold can be extracted every year, with a value of about 1 billion yuan.
During the reporter's visit, some villagers said that in the heyday of dismantling e-waste, large alchemists could import more than ten kilograms of gold a day, and most of the gold from gold shops and jewelry shops in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong came from this. With huge gold production, local people even claim that Guiyu can control the international gold price. More than 5000 electronic and plastic dismantling households and more than 100000 practitioners have realized their dream of making a fortune in the most primitive way.
Use the most primitive 'gold washing' and 'burning plate' to refine
In recent years, the domestic consumption of electronic products is increasing, which also drives the stock of e-waste. The price advantage of imported waste no longer exists, and there are great legal and policy risks, which makes the raw materials of e-waste disassembled in Guiyu in recent years mainly domestic.
But Guiyu dismantling waste e-waste is still the most traditional method.
A large number of electronic equipment transported here were manually divided into iron, copper, plastic, circuit board and other parts, and then baked and melted the parts on the circuit board with a carbon stove. If there are precious metals such as gold, sulfuric acid is used to wash gold. If copper is refined, it is used to burn plates.
Among them, the "gold washing" method has obvious Guiyu characteristics: mixed sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid and other chemical reagents are used to make "aqua regia", and the electronic waste containing precious metals is "burned and washed", which is locally called "blast furnace". After "going to blast furnace", copper and iron are separated, and then the burned and washed products are dissolved in nitric acid. After that, gold can be obtained through the indigenous process. Among them, the proportion of aqua regia and the refining process of indigenous methods are never passed on.
According to people familiar with the matter, there is a certain loss rate in the extensive refining of family workshops. The degree of purification is only about 90%, which can not reach 97-98% of that of regular factory refining. However, this does not affect the development of the dismantling industry in this area. Zhang Xiaozhen, who has been in business for many years, told reporters that as far as he knows, Guiyu's workshop style production costs 5-10 million yuan, which can be recovered after six months to one year of normal operation. Low cost, high rate of return, become a shortcut to make fast money.
During the heyday of electronic dismantling and recycling industry around the 1990s, the huge wealth attracted hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from Anhui, Hunan and other places. They came to Guiyu and worked as local employees. They broke up e-waste with their bare hands. A large number of e-waste residues (including toxic substances) were burned, buried or discarded at will.
Environmental cost: only 1 / 10 of the refining cost of large companies
In the process of gold washing, a large amount of vapor like acid gas is emitted, and acid mist can be seen from far away places. Guiyu is suffering from pollution by using the technology of 1200 years ago to deal with the garbage of the 21st century. The waste water from gold washing and the waste after dismantling have also caused immeasurable damage to the local environment. What seems like "easy to earn" money is all at the cost of health and the environment.
As early as 2003, the Department of Anthropology of Sun Yat sen University cooperated with relevant environmental protection organizations to conduct in-depth research on Guiyu. According to the research report, as early as the mid-1990s, the groundwater in Guiyu was seriously polluted and could not be drunk. Through physical examination in a village under the jurisdiction of Guiyu Town, the local health center found that more than 80% of primary and secondary school students in the village suffered from respiratory diseases, and 5 students suffered from blood cancer. This has something to do with the lead ash produced by the broken circuit board and the pollution caused by the extraction of metals.
At that time, the typical street view of Guiyu was small buildings with people living upstairs. The first floor was used as a square, and the old electrical appliances and refined residues occupied the road. The original way of burning boards and pickling makes the air full of pungent smell. Plastic and other wastes are piled up in the streets and lanes, and the black river is covered with garbage. Shocking scenes once filled every corner of Guiyu. Although the government cracked down on it many times, it rebounded again and again.
In 2010, the environmental monitoring of Guiyu town showed that the surface water, surface water sediment, groundwater, atmosphere and soil were generally polluted, and the contents of heavy metals and dioxins were high, leading to major environmental risks such as blood lead exceeding the standard.
According to industry sources, the refining cost of Guiyu is only 1 / 10 of that of a regular refining plant. Such a huge contrast comes from the small family workshop model. In the refining process, there is no protection measures for the environment, and then the environment will not be repaired. The large-scale back-end treatment companies will invest a lot of money in refining process research and development, and will be required to collect and treat the waste water, waste gas and residue after refining.
The refining end no longer exists? There is a long way to go for environmental remediation
In recent years, the local government is aware of the great damage to the environment caused by extensive operation, and has carried out a strict rectification of the electronic disassembly industry. In March 2016, Guiyu circular economy industrial park with a total investment of 1.58 billion yuan was officially put into operation after three years of preparation.
According to the staff of the industrial park, due to the decline of precious metal market for a time, the number of workshops in Guiyu has greatly shrunk. When the industrial park was officially put into operation, the existing 1243 electronic dismantling workshops were all established into a company to settle in the industrial park.
It is not easy to move from a small family workshop to an industrial park. For local practitioners, they don't have to pay rent for their own dismantling production, the site is not limited, and there is no sewage charge. Such standardized production means that the cost doubled. According to media reports, although many of the workshops have been established in name, they have actually set up branches in their furniture and started work secretly.
Environmental pollution has been a long-standing problem, and remediation can not be completed overnight.
According to the staff of the circular economy industrial park, "around 2013, the last two electrolysis plants in Guiyu have been closed due to the poor spot market of precious metals. At present, there is no place for gold smelting and copper electrolysis inside and outside the park. '
The whole industry is just dismantling,