Pulverizing Electronics, Recovering Valuable & Precious Metals
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- Опубліковано 1 кві 2022
- Pulverizing and grinding electronics to recover the valuable and precious metals! In this video Jason runs 5 different samples of waste electronics through our PCB turnkey processor. The processor pulverizes the computer boards, flat packs, pins, and batteries and then the shaker table separates the valuable metals from the waste plastic and fiberglass.
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You could check the pH of your water before and after grinding the lithium batteries. The lithium possibly ends up in dissolved in the water as lithium hydroxide. It will make the water alkaline. When you evaporate it next time, you might see salt crystals.
I’m a graduate student, for materials Eng, with a BS in Metallurgical Eng… a couple years ago I was contracted to do some preliminary testing for isolating anode.cathode from plastic/steel in batteries. I found froth flotation isolated better than anything for the bulk, and we could vary the float-cell chemistry to isolate individual components of the shredded/slurry.
I like your system! Our lab needs to update our shaker table!!!! I’m jealous. Hahaha
I am encouraged by your work, Jason. It’s easy to be depressed by the mountains of stuff that we throw away. Your recycling efforts are a real bright spot and leave me with a modicum of hope. MBMM, live long and prosper!
Have you seen a picture of the giant plastic island bigger then the state of texas? That's really depressing
The specific gravity of Lithium is only 0.53, and lithium oxide is 2.013. Fiberglass is typically 1.0-1.8. That means probably a lot of that black stuff going into #4 is lithium oxide, which the customer probably wants to catch and separate from the fiberglass and plastic. You probably need to re-tune the table for ultra-light materials, and re-run the #3 and #4 fractions to recover the lithium oxide.
Genius!!
gravity ?
It's called; specific weight.
@@tabascoraremaster1 No, he had it correct for the numbers he provided.
"The specific weight, also known as the unit weight, is the weight per unit volume of a material."
"Relative density, or specific gravity,[1][2] is the ratio of the density (mass of a unit volume) of a substance to the density of a given reference material."
Weight depends entirely on gravitational field strength, while mass is constant.
Regarding the batteries: There exists several different kinds of anode and cathode materials which are used in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. Cathode active materials include LiMn2O4, LiCoO2, Li-NMC-O2 (mixed Ni-Mn-Co instead of just Co), LiFePO4 and more. Most common anode material is probably purified, spheroidized graphite. Majority of the lithium is associated with and carried on by these heavier cathode materials (density something like ~4-5 g/cm3 iirc), except for the Li present as electrolyte salt (and any Li still intercalated in to the graphite) which would mostly dissolve in water, depending on the quantity of H2O vs. solids utilized.
My understanding is that these cathode powders are mixed with carbon black (fine carbon powder, to increase the conductivity) before applied as a slurry (powder + PVDF binder + solvent for the binder) on the cathode aluminium foil. At least the batteries which contain oxidic cathode materials utilize organic electrolytes (not water). The electrolyte is usually composed of an organic solvent (I'm aware of different kinds of liquid organic carbonates, e.g. dimethyl carbonate) to which a charge carrying salt is dissolved. This salt can be e.g. lithium hexafluorophosphate. My understanding (possibly flawed) is that the polymeric separator membrane between the anode and cathode houses this electrolyte solution. I would be careful and avoiding exposure to the generated solutions as they might contain dissolved fluorine and lithium from the electrolyte. These solutions might be pretty rough on the equipment as well and cause corrosion (similar if you happened to have chloride-containing process solutions).
Most of these oxidic materials are black (the oxidic cathode powder on aluminium foils). Graphite is also black (anode powder on copper foils). Therefore, the color of the materials might tell less than expected. Thank you for the video, this was very interesting to see in practice.
In the integrated circuits , aka IC's (flat packs), you typically can recover gold, silver, platinum, copper, Palladium, Germanium, silicon, and other minute amounts of precious metals. Gold wires are typically used for internal connections, as well as plating the external pins, and in some cases the outside of the IC. I am quite impressed by your system. Some day I would like to run up and see your operation.
The flat packs are ic chips, some are indeed called flat packs but are a little different, you are correct that the gold comes from the wire, they are called bonding wires that connect the chip that sits in the center of the package and makes the connection to the legs that extend out of the package.
It's a mix of IC chips and flat packs.
Some of those IC chips looked like they might still be good and they just got pulverized, god that hurts.
Just to clarify IC = Integrated Circuit. Also yes you are correct the gold is from really fine wire (traces).
@@orsonzedd and if you keep the chips whole they have intresting detail on them
Can you run this through a gold sluice after grinding them up
The black stuff in the batteries is graphite, which forms the positive electrode. Smashing a lithium cell in air and water is going to send all of the lithium compounds to your lightest bin, as it's going to be less heavy than plastic. It will be in the form of lithium carbonate (by the time you find it), which is a white powder. Probably the easiest way to harvest it will be to let your water settle, then drain it, then evaporate the water for its residue. Lithium carbonate has a solubility in water that would likely exceed 10 battery cells (18650) per liter of water, which you clearly have many times that much in your system, compared to the number of cells in that bucket.
Second Buck’s comment absolutely correct.
Thank you for posting this. You gave the right information and feedback, showed a good amount of the process, and the camera work was better than 99% of youtube.
If companies can make money by pulling a small amount of precious metals from large rocks, then there has to be a way to profitably pull them out of waste that is full of them.
They do. E-waste is big business.
There is.
- You charge people to take their waste away.
- You dismantle it, either all at once by smashing it, or one piece at a time
- You smash everything into the very tiniest pieces, and sell them as raw materials.
a landfill has more gold per tonne then some operating gold mines
Companies are going to be mining landfills for precious metals and rare earth elements given enough time.
@@TKing2724 For sure. Like how people dig through trash for cans. We are always throwing away stuff that other people know how to turn into money.
I would love to see you smelting this material and figuring out how to separate the alloys
I second that, I came here for this knowledge 😂
Jason, the angle which you show the table gives a great view of the actual table construction. It's the 1st time I've been able to see the ramp and gives a better understanding of how the table works so well.
Just found this video through the algorithm. I looked through the comments here, but I don't see anyone mentioning this: You should really take some time and survey the different IC chips you get, and look up their numbers/values. Dedicated electronics recyclers almost ALWAYS will run boards through processes to desolder and recover all the ICs, prior to recycling the rest of the PCB and components, because it's the largest profit margin item in the entire process. Some working IC chips are often MORE valuable than the precious metals/materials you can extract from them. It doesn't matter how old they are, if they are working they can be resold. In fact, really old ones that maybe aren't manufactured anymore can pull a hefty premium on the resale market.
I remember being told when visiting a tin mine in UK Cornwall may years ago that the real profit was in the tailings pond (your No. 4) but no one then knew how to recover the metals in it, it being so fine. Listening and watching you here I would suggest that your tailings are better kept fora rainy day because I suspect there is good material in them; it's just very very small.
Somebody is a genius to invent such a simple operation to separate that material. Great video.
One electrode is coated in carbon. Thats definitely black. The other is coated in a Lithium compound that also looks dark. So I guess the no. 3 black stuff is carbon and the no. 2 black stuff is the lithium.
Some of that is also Cobalt compounds, and there is probably some Manganese in the mix as well. Or maybe not, it depends on the chemistry of the cells 🤷♂
The black goo in most batteries is manganese dioxide powder with an electrolyte such as potassium hydroxide solution while the black rods are carbon and the black sheets can be graphoil or just a separator or collector with either manganese dioxide or black nickel oxide embedded in it.
Either way the wastewater will end up being a relatively caustic base.
If you process lead acid batteries at the same time, the wastewater may be less caustic since the sulfuric acid can combine with the lithium, sodium and potassium hydroxides to form sulfates.
Either way it's gonna be rough on the hammer mill and other equipment.
@@technosaurus3805You won't want to stick your bare hands in the water after running those batteries through. Those toxic chemicals can make weak acids and eat away at the metal parts of the shaker table.
Re: highly caustic or acidic solutions, usually the best idea is to add some kind of weak acid/base buffer to neutralise.
AFAIK lithium reacts with water to form lithium hydroxide, which is a strong base, not an acid. I don't think it really attacks the metal. The electrolite in Li-ion batteries are organic solvents, which are probably not very healthy but also not highly toxic.
Cody from Cody's Lab would love this. NileRed too, this is cool as hell, glad to see there's people out there making an effort to recycle old tech like this, rather than letting it all go to waste
I just came across this video, what a great way to help people and companies recycle their electronics. I really enjoyed learning about your process and actually seeing what's in the boards and in batteries. Subscribed!
Inside the flatpacks are fine gold wires that serves as the actual connections inside the chip from the silicon wafer (if silicon) to the external pins.. Flatpacks don't usually yield much gold at all 1 to 4g per KG.
@@hammerhand5059 Yeah.. but the cost of buying these things nullifies any potential profit.. Now, If you were lucky enough to buy metric tons of E-Scrap for pennies a pound then it might be worth it using this method..
@@hammerhand5059 You're 100% correct, about the drop off option.. I had a small operation.. crude but effective.. use of air chisels to liberate components, screen sort and process.. I want to see the end result and gold yield from this
@@hammerhand5059 theoretically with a modified grain mill and a sluice box you could do most of the process, just not as efficient
The problem is to get enough waste to load out such a system. 1g/kg would be very profitable if you could get the stuff in tons per day.
And then most of the profit is from the copper.
@@hammerhand5059 I doubt you would get much gold. The current usage for gold on connectors is very thin especially for consumer grade products that are expecting just a few insertions. There is still a lot of copper and that would probably be more valuable. I only used silver once in my career on a small product whose company went out of business quite quickly.
You just taught me in a few minutes how recycling circuit boards works. Thank you!
Got a crate with bags filled up with fingers , old processors and so on.
Mostly from old computers.
This would be so nice to do the second step.
Not sure how I am going to clean it up but such a system will save lots of time and acid.
Im a novice having spent the last 5 years learning about e-waste recovery. Watching you and Dan is super educational and entertaining, the top 1% of what's on the web. Keep up the good work.
Jason, there are several videos showing the bond wire process. It'll give you a visual of how it's done, and what it looks like. For technical info on the specifics of the bond wire themselves, manufacturers give that on their websites. Composition, diameter, length on their spools, size of spools.
The legs are almost always tin plated copper. Tinned copper is readily soldered, and doesn't tarnish or corrode as bad as bare copper.
Chips can be "decapped". For plastic, I've seen it done with sulfuric acid. Hobbiests, geeks, engineers have uploaded vids of them decapping chips, and examining them at high magnification.
Awesome technology you've developed. I left a comment on previous video that I used to work at DFC Ceramics in Canon City Colorado making crucibles and Fire Assay Furnaces. Your knowledge is very impressive. New subscriber Mark
Sory one more thing I would be keeping a log of the weight at the start and how much it all comes to through each step and each bag as it's separated and you know what the loss is at the end and that you can determine where it is. Getting all the board fiberglass out will help with not having to deal with a worthless contaminants. Some sort of agitator are a vac to such up the dust .
This was super cool. I wish you had another run through a different shaker that would let you separate things even in finer detail.
I love this type of stuff, been looking forward to another e waste video since the last one. People were saying you should grind it up finer and I would agree.
Thats a nice machine. Cant believe how stable the hammer crusher is.
Super cool Jason would love to see you smelt the gold or copper or silver from these components and the process there. Super cool to see what recycling can accomplish.
Awesome Video Jason. Loved it, great small process.
Wow! Your mill really does a good job! Looks like an ideal crush!
More people need to see short 4min videos of electronic recycling methods such as these to know that almost everything can be recovered.
Thank you for making this concise and clear
Impressive, how good the process runs. Would be interesting, whats left each metal after chemical and melting separation.
One of the best videos out there, shows definite results
nice video and information. I have spent my life in designing and producing IC electronics, ic, etc, but now I am more interested in execrating the values of old electronics.
i do like your system!!! i have pulled the gold pins from the plastic connectors, so i didn't need to tear any of them up...it took a bit of time. i used a hot soldering iron to remove the gold fingers. easy, too.
I read about a chip recycler who pulls functional chips off boards and sells them. He said the business used to only reclaim the metals, 'We'd get the $500 worth of gold and throw away the $10,000 worth of chips."
There should be a good amount of tin in there also. (Pins are coated with tin)
You just ground up billions of times more computing power than existed in the world 50 years ago....I find that to be amazing.
Good set-up you have, I do my own recovery of gold, silver, copper etc. I use a kit of each from Caswell plating but reverse the polarity and drop thin hard copper wire 22 ga. and leave it running for 24 hours 6-12 volts.
I love to see your work. Thanks for sharing!!
Great content as usual. Thanks for sharing. I always learn something.
The "Flat Packs" are IC(Integrated Circuit) chips that are soldered onto circuit boards. The other bucket is mostly adapter/expansion slots like graphics cards plug into, and some of them look like power slots.
On the IC Chips, the fine gold is most likely "gold bond wires". They are normally 22k to 24k solid.
I'm pretty sure they would recover more gold in the #3 if they wanted to go further with it.
great use of your machines! i never imagined running electronics thru mining equipment. and i'm suprised i havent seen something like this sooner.
Hi Jason, I've read about half of the comments - didn't see any mention of the metal Tin. A lot of the white metal you see is probably tin - which is the solder used to hold the components on the boards. All the gold plated pins have some tin on them. In the bucket of IC chips - the chips that have legs on all 4 sides are the flatpacks. The chips that are rectangular with slightly larger legs on just 2 sides are called in-line chips. The flatpacks usually have more gold in them than the in-line chips. Can't help you with the batteries! Great video! Take Care, Jim
Hey Jason best videos on recycling I have ever seen on computer scrap you are teaching me so much on how to recover the the precious metals. I thank u from the bottom of my heart and so will a lot of other disadvantaged people from around the world. I am setting up a recycling business and will be working with a lot of the materials that are being used on your videos u have made it possible for me to help all of the people and children who need immediate assistance eg Save the children fund thanku once again god bless u. U must be an Angel of a god bye!!
The way that the copper and other metals were balling up with the chips, and the gold bonding wires were ultra fine, I am curious what the samples would have looked like if they were run through a series of classifiers. I imagine an under 100 mesh to have nothing but gold.
People that think they can get rich quick doing this need to see this video. It’s not easy or cheap to recover any of it. Great job and glad to see your recycling and keeping the planet healthier 👍
This is the best video Ive seen and fascinating as Ive worked with metal coating electronics and shaker tables (albeit different reasons). Im guessing the gold is such a fine particle size as it will be very thin and as soon as it encounters shear forces it will forms flakes. Do you have an x-ray fluorescence gun? Pointing it at those packs would be very interesting!
Thanks you so much for posting this.
Love your work , much respect from perth West Oz 👏 👍 ...
Great video Jason that's a very interesting way to process pcb boards thank you for sharing five stars
Awsome. I Got the idea for my work. Thanks for your video
when you were processing the gold plated fingers and circuit boards, there were a lot of what looked like flattened metal beads. That's most likely the through-holes which are actually filled with Lead or tin based solder. They would flatten out rather than breaking up into small bits because Lead is a soft metal.
We have not used lead based solder in electronics manufacturing for many years (ref RoHS) , so most likely through holes with current non-lead solder.
Great Video and Ready To see the Next step with the Material
Well, what you are seeing in the #1 bag that looks like pins or needles is solid gold pins off processors and some expensive IC's. I personally believe as you do about recycling gold from high yield computer cap parts, but only if you are able to recycle your own chemicals for re-use, because you have to be able to keep the cost down as much as possible.
Great stuff Jason , that seemed like you enjoyed separating the different elements from its host materials. I really enjoyed this concept of recycling as much as possible with minimal waste. Although it seems like a lot of initial work done before you got them. Is this customer looking to buy one of your turn key systems? If so that's fantastic for you , if not they may still require your services and support.
Thanks Jason. Cheers
I wish I had time to come up there and help you. I've been recovering and refining gold from E-Scrap for many years. I have about a ton of extremely high grade material that I would love to run through your plant, and refine.
I think that's so cool how that separate the material's who ever invented these machines are very Blessed to have the knowledge
I found it quite interesting, some years ago I had to go to a electromagnet specialist company where they produced special magnets which could be tuned to pick up or separate different metals (gold included) they did not give me much info on how, but again it was interesting and thought provoking. As a thought perhaps a hand held XFM unit would help to identify the different materials.
The pins are typically Cu, or Cu / Be alloy (for tensile strength), and are plated with Au, Ag, Sn, or Sn / Pb alloy depending on age and use of the pins. If one is recycling relay contacts, one might find Ag, Ag / Cd, Cu, or Cu / Be metals. Of course, all this is subject to change as various alloys are substituted depending upon usage, tensile strength, and current carrying capabilities. Aluminum is used much more in current devices and applications. The round blobs are probably the through hole copper plated conductors which may or may not contain a plating of Sn / Pb. The separation process looks really good and electrodeposition, Aqua Regia with chemical purification or direct gold smelting look to be good recovery methods for your turnkey circuit board or integrated circuit processing plant. The metallic content of the connectors and pin strips will the same content as the boards and have a lot of plastics (PVC, CPVC, ABS, and even UHMW) included.
Great job Jason!
That shaker table is cool. I'd imagine you need huge quantities to make a profit.
Wonder if it could be refined even more if you dumped bucket #2 and #3 back through the shaker table.
Hey Jason thanks for another great vid. When can we expect an update from your gold mine? You sent out a vid of you portalling months ago and got us (well me anyway) all excited to see more. Cheers from a fellow mine Geo.
i noticed the comment above and below yours received a lil heart but yours did not, so i guess no update on the mine..
Hadn't seen a post in awhile. Was trusting you were ok. Great video.
Interesting process. The issue with the industry is they build stuff, but never care how difficult it will be to separate and retrieve all different chemical elements. That process cannot be skipped if we want to recycle something.
Great job here!
A concrete ground would be perfect to prevent any water to go in the environment. Industry should give you some financial support.
When I worked in a pc board plant I worked in plating and another metal we used was nickel so there is probably a lot of that in there as well. When I work in edge plating I would have at least 20 oz of powdered gold in the cyanide bath at one time, even though the layers were thin it didn't take a long time to go through what was in there, the chemist would constantly take samples and use a machine to test the thickness of the gold on the boards to know if and how much gold to keep adding to the bath as you should get a specific thickness per a given time in the bath. You can use magnets spaced strategically to separate ferrous from non-ferrous metals. There is an interesting guy with a channel on youtube that swears he can even set a sluice box up with magnets to increase your capture of flour gold because even though it is non-ferrous the magnet still does have enough effect on the gold enough to push it to specific areas. If you are interested I can find the link to that video.
Gold, silver, aluminum, copper, steel, pallium, and fiber plastic are all what's in chips, flatpacks, CPUs, pins, and teeth. So far, you weren't doing too bad w/ info. 😁😁😁🤙🤙🤙 Love this video though. I've got to remember this setup though. 😁😁😁💙💙💙
That was very educational.. Thank you for sharing..
I can't believe how well you run that shaker table. I kind of get how it works but, it honestly looks like that would be impossible to master. (You make it look too easy lol)
The computer chips( flat packs,) have copper pins coated in nickel or tin, and haveva silicon die connected to the pins with tiny gold wires. Like 1/2 or smaller than a human hair , even LED's have the gold wire in them. Higher quality leds have more gold justifying some of the extra cost, and usually why they last longer!
NZ govt is looking at doing exactly this now, cheers for the informative video!
The gold in the flat packs is the bonding wires connecting the legs to the chip.
What screen size are you grinding this to?
Running the first batch with the exposed foils hurt to watch, because from that point is what I love to process. Grinding it all together will make and is making more work processing the separation of the metal types. There is a order to follow removing the metals in order not cause problems down the line by mixing them all together like this not sure my current (favorite) process methods would work..
You mentioned the densities of material that the shaker table handles. I'm curious as to what the densities of the #1, #2, etc are on each material. How do the densities compare between the pin connectors vs fiberglass boards?
Flatpacks are the fatter rectangular ships ,usually connected to the board by a bunch of steel or aluminum
Connectors running up on either side,they are raised up from the board, so the chip isn't glued or soldered the clips mount it
This looks really fun and satisfying
All of the chips in the components are gold backed. What you call flat packs are full of gold. I was a thin films specialist at Motorola.
It feels worrisome that UA-cam knows what I want to watch even when I don't. I never would have sought this out, but I can't stop watching.
This was very cool, I want a setup like yours. Black stuff in batteries could have been lithium iron or one of the other battery ion combinations.
The process you use is very efficient
@mbmmllc in black packs is pure Gold as "Gold bonding wires" those wires somtimes are silver/aluminium. White stuff Could be silver/tin plated copper/brass. In li-ion batteries there is two kinds of black powder. On copper electrode it is graphite, on aluminium electrode mix of "nickel/lithium/cobalt and manganese"
As an electrical engineer this is super interesting to me. Very interesting to see a way to recover the precious metals that are used in IC and PCB manufacturing. I'm not an expert by any means but might have some answers to your questions.
In response to the colors of metals you are seeing. Most PCBs will use copper layers and on the connection points the copper will be plated with gold, tin, lead, silver, nickel, and germanium in different alloys and chemistry depending on the application that the PCB was designed for.
The things you were referring to as flat packs are mostly flat packs from what I could see so right on with that. Also saw some DIP, SOIC, and QFP. I usually just call them ICs or integrated circuits because there are hundreds of different kinds of packages in modern electronics.
Many ICs use a technology called bond wires and they are usually made of very fine gold wire that connects the silicon die to the lead or pins on the plastic packaging. Very cool process and lots of UA-cam videos showing just the insane speed at which machines can place these wires in manufacturing.
Very cool video. Thanks for sharing this!
Also would be interested to know what the black powder is in the batteries.
The tiny gold wires are from the inside of the chip. They connect the pins to the silicon wafer inside. The outside pins are likely "tinned" with solder.
Black stuff is usually either charcoal or graphite with catalyst. Sometime Hydroflouric or other acid.
It's like gold rushing with a machine, cool
Have you tried to add a surfactant to your water? Might help in the separation.
Always entertaining buddy! ❤️👍🏼 Was hoping to see some smelting and cupeling rather than watching that battery stuff but thanks for sharing 😊✌🏼🌎
Maybe an idea for the dust coming from the inlet of the hammer mill. you can create a mist right behind that "door" to knock all the dust down. I've seen these things in like amusement parks and festivals to cool visitors but I think it would also work perfectly for containing te dust.
What would happen if you run the #3 again thru the machine?
Awesome video and awesome setup. Do you have any info on your pulverizing services? I looked on the mbmm site, but don't see anything about that. I'd love to buy a machine, but that's a dream right now.
Would've loved to see some sort of analysis especially on the battery samples. Idea for next video!
It amazes me the things you can mine. So interesting.
I am assuming the ICs (flat packs) question about where the gold comes from, has already been answered, but there are very thin connections from the silicone waffle to the IC leads, that sometimes are gold.
you have to consider that even the tin (very thin steel) has value.
there are companies that are CURRENTLY mining old landfills for the metals.
if you have removed the boards from a cell phone, you will know just how tiny the brass nuts embedded in the plastic are that the screws screw into. well i myself take the the time and effort to remove even these tiny bits of metal from the plastic before i throw the plastic in the trash to head to the landfill!
one does NOT have to go looking for boards to process. i use to live in south east iowa and a garbage service guy use to bring me truck loads of electronics (he got paid to haul them away) and i could dump all the plastic i wanted into his dumpsters 24/7 at his shop (he had 6 dumpsters at that location).one time he brought me a pickup truck load of power backups the court house had replaced with brand new ones, they still worked just fine and so were the AGM batteries in them!!
plastic is made from PETROLEUM and can be turned back into FUELS
Imma need that smelting video next, I wanna know how much valuable metals you got!!
The black flat packs and such. Some , but not all have gold bonding wires extending from the legs to the the silicon wafer (chip). The chip is mounted on a metallic base plate that is plated with a precious metal. The plating used depends on the function and manufacturer of the chip. Back to the bond wires, they are so small they will float on water, very tricky to recover. The legs in most cases are nickle. Sometimes plated with gold or sliver. Again it depends on the function of the chip. The #3 from the flat packs will likely contain a good bit of gold wires still encased in the black epoxy
Copper, aluminum, current collectors. pvdf binder, pvdf or ptfe separator, and the casing material
Anode- likely spherical graphite with (~2-5% binder), if newer than 2018 and they could have some silicon nano particles for increased capacity. Need fire or n-methyl-pyroiodone to remove pvdf binder. The smoke fumes will have fluorides so be careful with that.
cathode (grey black) cobalt, magnesium, nickel mix- likely a cobalt heavy or 333 mix for older batteries(metals precipitated together as a single particle). also contains a 2-5% pvdf binder
Lithium will be oxidized, or intercalated into the graphite or cathode material.
Electrolyte contains ethylene carbonate (solid at room temp) and diethyl carbonate(liquid at room temperature), new batteries also have ethyl methyl carbonate for improved low temp function( flammable liquid @ room temp)
The nastily material in the electrolyte is lithium-hexafloraphosphate which acts as the salt.
The fluoride in the salt stabilizes the molecule and helps to prevent breakdown over time.
I wish I had your job! Man that would be so cool 💯
The flat packs are integrated circuits, or IC chips. There's some processors there by the looks of it, along with some other digital and analog chips. The gold does indeed come from "hair wire", commonly known as bonding wires. It's what connects the pins, or legs, of the chip to the actual silicon chip die inside the chip. Sadly, some chips don't have any gold content, they just use copper bonding wires instead of gold. There could also be some gold plating on the pins of some chips, but it doesn't seem there were such in your buckets. They would have golden pins, but those are usually used only in special equipment. Some chips can also have a gold plated metal base inside the package, but these are typically very old and not likely to show up for recycling anymore.
The circuit board gold is actually gold plating. Usually it's copper that is first plated with a layer of nickel, and then the gold is plated as a second layer on top. Sadly, it almost all cases, the gold plating is only on the exposed areas of the board where electrical connections happen. The rest of the board is just a glass textolite copper sheet (either single, double side, or multiple copper layers) with solder mask (the usually green color) on top.
Love the experiments! Wish I knew someone like you in my area. I need a new business.