Used to work for veolia..doing ReFractory all ober the place ..veolia has more companys doing different jobs than grains of sand on a beach...lol but serious they are SOOOOOOOO huge its not even funny
Eric very interesting here in South Africa we have people who go to abandoned mines and mine for gold it is illegal yet people do so your stories of panning or mining on the side of road is not too far off thank you for sharing your wonderful videos I am from South Africa
I was going to mention Cody's old video. Props to mentioning his channel! The video was a few years old, maybe price per ton extraction costs makes it profitable now... Cheers,
Yep, I remembered Cody's video right away too, and yes, it wasn't worthwhile then. Maybe because of car relevance, one should pan the dust collected in the airfilter box? Cold air intakes are next to exhaust pipes all the time, so they might have a higher concentration than the average roadside dirt?
OEM catalytic converters in the U.S. have much much more catalyst material in them because by federal law the catalytic converters must last at least 10 yr / 120,000 miles under normal operation. Aftermarket ones do not have that requirement except in CARB states such as California and New York that do not allow aftermarket converters on California emissions cars. Sadly nothing has really shown itself to be a viable replacement for these rare materials in a solid non consumable catalyst. The only replacement would be urea based injection using copper zeolite matrix. Diesels have to use this because diesel exhaust is much cooler, way below the operating temperatures of automotive catalysts and swing widely between rich and lean conditions as diesels are fuel throttled. Urea works for gasoline but would be another consumable people would have to buy.
@@chipfarnsworth7790 awesome group. Lunatic Fringe is my favorite song of all time. Was also my entrance song when I boxed in the Philly League. Badass for sure...
*Awesome channel! I made a video of my stolen catalytic converter. I have a mystery problem with my Honda Element that I also made a video of. I know Eric the Car Guy is busy so I won't bother him. If anyone wants to let me know what's wrong with my Element, please stop by and let me know. Thanks guys! Take care!* #BigMacSam
Imagine if you will a vehicle that gathers all debris from a roadway. It sorts and distinguishes the mundane from the valuble. Every so often ejecting a cube/container/package from the variety it has collected. Those of less value could be recycled by a third party. The most valuable of course would stay within the said vehicle. Think Dr.Suess! It will become so clear in the fog of your mind.
That’s with super heavy and fast machinery. Collecting the tons of dirt with bulldozers and conveyor belts is different than sweeping or vacuuming the roads for tons.
1:57 OMG! I guess that is why the aftermarket cat on my '05 Element is starting to hold that pending code of P0420 "catalyst efficiency below threshold bank 1". Dunno how many miles on it because I bought it with the aftermarket cat on it. I find that giving 'er the old "Italian tune up" seems to make the MIL light go away for a while.
I observed back a few decades the sudden disintegration of the ceramic substrate that emptied out all over the highway. This was somewhat common back in the day but the metals should still be around for collection.
Part of the problem with why converter become less effective over time is that the metal particles fuse together and there is now less surface area for the reactions to take place. There is also poisoning of the metals by phosphorus. And as mentioned, the metals end up going out the tail pipe. I do think that the metals fusing is the biggest issue and there is work going on on how to prevent this so they can start off with less metal. The aftermarket cats for sure use less metal and therefore have a shorter warranty. I think the OEM cat is mandated to last at least 8 years.
I would think anywhere there is a traffic light on a highway would offer the best bang for the buck. Hard acceleration up to 55 (okay 70) mph would likely spit out more material in a smaller area than just humming along a long stretch of highway. An industrial vacuum to pick up the lighter debris might do it 🤔
What about mufflers? I would imagine a muffler would almost act as a trap zone. Maybe alot is trapped inside the muffler that's usually after the catalytic converter
Thanks for sharing Eric, interesting research that you shared with us today & honestly you gave a new idea to the emissons regulating authorities😉 Stay Safe👍
Might be more profitable to “mine” in an area with a high amount of bumper to bumper traffic. I would think that would lead to a higher concentration of precious metals per ton.
I've always thought some garbage dumps from the 80s and 90s where technology was moving so fast and everything was going to the dump full of precious metals would be a good investment to mine.
I got a Carrier Tech 2000 style A/C condensing unit, which is now hooked up and cools my house. I'm guessing someone was hauling it in for scrap and it fell off the truck or trailer.
I was walking down a sidewalk and looked to my left to see a large blackish area of dirt? And after a moment I knew what I was looking at. It was a large mass of black soot from where semi's had cleaned their stacks. The parking lot they parked in was concentrating this material in one small location and also filling the drain with it that was beside it. Since then I've been refining this material. Every 70k miles a semi must clean their stacks manually or automatically or their engines will not operate right. Well they are creating a gold mine in parking lots!
i thought the same thing when i first saw Codys' video a few week ago. why don't they mine the roads to recycle these metals? Cody has a great channel. been watching him for years.
In other news. Police are baffled by the huge digs occuring on America's roads. From hi-ways to city roads. Authorities advise drivers to slow down amd watch out for these holes popping up all over the country.
I remember the old Gold Fever show featured a guy in LA who would sweep the dust out of curbs nearest the river and mountains in CA and would recover a very impressive amount of placer gold. Granted it was exceptionally fine and not commercially viable but for a hobby, a pretty lucrative one.
Replacement CATs don't have to meet the same standards as OEM CATs even though the EPA mandates the same 50k miles\5 year warranty for both. The OEM CATs are only required to meet EPA performance standards for 25k miles vs 50k miles for OEM.
@@markschmalenberger8301 Hopefully back into the tool box but sometime I do forget to put them back and they get left at the junkyard or left outside somewhere.
You all Should realize. If this stuff is in the side of the road. Is because it was in the air. Like when you drive behind other cars..... When you drive in front of someone.... Be aware
There are 28.35 grams per ounce. If we take the figure you posted in this video ($1214.82) and divide it by 28.35 we get the per gram amount of $42.85. Now multiply it by 6.7 for the grams found in a ton of debris and you get $287.10 per ton of debris processed. There's not a whole lot of profit there right now, no matter how you cut it, though it is food for thought.
I thought about buying a street sweeper machine and mounting the equipment to something larger and vacuuming up every side street in my city.... then working outward...
The amount of effort to make to mine freeway dust may not equal the pay off - yet! But if there is a business model- there is a business- right?!? Oh FYI I LOVE CODYS LAB!
It is the 100,000++ manufacturers CAT that cost a small fortune vs. aftermarket one that will last a fraction of that . Since most people drive 10K a year the aftermarket works for most people.
If you got a contract to clean the highways for the government, no talk of extraction or whatever then you have a company that is paid to mine this relatively easy to vaccume up and store dust what whatever, I'm. Sure you could out it though some multi layered shakers and work out what particles are too big to counts in anything. I think now it would be profibale to mine from the side of the roads especially in nations with alot of road usage like the US, cheaper labour could be better but you could hire illigals. Its very rare to see a car in the US that has an Engine under 2L I know a few modern hybrid cars or small turbo cars may have them but they are realy for the euro market. Most cars and trucks maybe 98% run on petrol and I would assume the average engine size would be around 3L or more. Bigger engines need bigger cats so more metals, diesels just have anti smog stuff and I'm not sure if they have any peciouse metals. I was born in the UK and every car I had was a Trubo diesel that was remapped with a bigger turbo, Injectors and an intercooler, sometimes I would have to put a better gearbox and clutch that could handle it from the scrap yard but most of the good ones are made by the VAG group, audi, WV, seat and Skoda. You could get 80% more torque and 50% more HP with a simple remap. My first car was before the PD or common rail Injectors so I could run the car off anything that was an oil and was filtered well and had no water in and not too thin. I would usualy choose realy light and small cars as less weight and remove as much weight as I could. I had a methanol/water spray system I made out if scrap for the intercoolers, I think nearly all the parts I used cost very little as they where from wrecked cars but still good the only real money I had to spend was if I needed something custom made for example a manifold or turbo adapter or something like that but it would not cost much. I was thankful as my friend worked for a remapping place. I changed so much stuff and protected slot of stuff from heat. The exasut was just a straight pipe, sounded like a sherman tank I would go see a friend in the airport and get used hydraulic fluid and some waste kerosine, the used hydraulic fluid was very clean. I would use 2 Stoke oil, farmers tax free red diesel. Cheap rectified machine oil Engine oil. Used engine oil filtered with an electromagnet then a centrefuge and then alot of filters then remove any water but most used engine oil was fine. New vegetable oil was fine in the summer and so was used vegetable oil that was filtered and water removed, it would not run in the winter unless syou had a second heated tank and heated fuel lines. You could mess around with chemicals to make it fine in all weather conditions but I never bothered. Most of the time I would use red farming/marine/heating diesel that used to be high sulper and ran so much better than regular road diesel but it was illigal as no or low tax. Now its the standard stuff and much more expensive. Used hydraulic fluid from aircraft worked amazing and passenger jets changed it often so it was clean and per plane it was quite a lot, they usualy had to pay people to dispose of that, I was lucky that my local airport replaced engines and stuff for airbus so they did alot of standard maintance on both airbus and boeing. When kerosine jet fuel was cheap I would mix it with cheap rebated oil, 2 Stoke or realy cheap engine oil until it was slightly thicker than diesel. Sometimes 2 Stoke oil was half the price of diesel at the pumps. Even less if you got it in bulk. I did use used veg and motor oil but it was so dirty to mess around with, you could tell what type of food it was from the exhaust. Maybe 60% of road vehicles are diesel in Europe and they have not made or imported vans or picksups that run on petrol since the early 90s, you never see them apart from at car shows, I'm not sure why in the US they don't have a diesel instead of a big v6 or v8 as if your hauling the torque and mpg a diesel gives you is so much better and the engines are made crazy strong. My father when we was alive had some classic cars and bikes he would have his daily driver, a fast Japanese import bike, then a Classic car and usualy an old British bike like a triumph or BSA. He would often change them out but he would always convert the car to LPG (liquid propane) for a car powered car it was very very easy to is tall you had a tank in the trunk and run a line to the front then you would have a LPG carb that went under the standard carb but inside the car you would have a switch, you would usualy start the car with petrol and then change to LPG, LPG is pretty high octsone and used to be over half the price of petrol. An LPG system for fuel injection or at least fuel injection with a cat is more involved but still worth it as its the only ecenomical way to drive a car with a large engine in the UK and many nations. In the UK petrol and diesel are around £2 for 1l with diesel being about 10p higher thanks Russia. LPG, gas for cooking and heating and the price of eletrisoty have all doubled or more since and its kind of funny as electric cars are not that much cheaper to drive now compared to a car with a good MPG, you save the most on the yearly tax. People think electric cars pollute nothing. Battery tech is awfull and solor in the UK is dumb and does not save much if your whole roof is solar, wind turbines work but only when it's windy. Geothermal is too expensive and solar water pipes may work 1 or 2 months our or the year. They want to ban the sales of all fossil fuel cars by 2030 and pullute nothing by 2050 but the UK pullute less than 1% in the globes as no real heavy industry and its a tiny nation. It's hurting the normal person so much as half of these bills for electric and gas go for carbon tax and green whatever tax they made up. For the UK and many nations the best idea is going nuclear, epseciakybin places that don't experience natural disasters like the UK, we could build them on many of the islands we have or in the middle of nowhere, plenty of that, new reactor designs especially the smaller ones are much safer and eceomical, you can use reinriched fuel rods that are alot cheaper and many of the smaller plants are modular, completely automated, can store used rods until they are picked up for enrichment, and can take less than a year to build. Alor of smaller nearly all closed reactors are safer than a huge one. Also you could have plants a safe distance away from the power plant and humans that could use pretty much any type of water that's been filtered and turn it into hydrogen with the only byproduct being oxygen it would be much more effixiat to have it closer to the plant due to eletrical resistance. Then they could make an underground pipe system so you can refuel your car and heat your home and cook with the only byproduct being water. You could pretty much convert any petrol or diesel engine to run on it, similar to LPG, with diesel you would need some oil for lubrication but only a little and could be synthetic. I'm not anti renewable but it just won't happen with the tech we have and the battery tech we have, I hope cold fusion can happen in my life time.
Is it? Is it filled? I took apart an oem suzuki cat. There were 2 "discs" of cat-material in there. Ok... the aftermarket cat had just one, but the oem cat wasn't filled with a solid piece of cat-material.
Re the potential for the "roadside mining" of platinum, palladium & rhodium, they should mine for lead & asbestos as well... On a side note... let this be a lesson to never eat anything edible growing alongside heavily traveled roads and highways(!)
And I still remember a stupid dumb ass person where I live I had to put a new cat in a Chevy cobalt and I wanted to recycle it and I asked how much would it be they answered "oh depends on the car" then I'm like...... Well I know what car it's from can I just tell you that? Then they were like "oh my person that knows here left for the day" it was fricken 2 in the afternoon and they closed at 5.... then I asked well what the rate then then they responded "oh it's like $1 to $100" kind of estimate is that?!??!! I said eff it going in the trash I was looking for like at least 25 bucks off it maybe 20 but I know they would give me the dollar so yeah trash oh and that was 3 years ago.
a ton of gravel is equal to one cubic yard, if Cody's correct that would hold roughly $400 of platinum. if that were actual dirt in a mine, it would be considered very rich ground!
Problem with 'mining' roads for it is first the reagent costs to process the tiny amounts from the sweepings and the labor cost to sweep so much of the highway will make it non profitable. CC reprocessing is profitable because you have a fairly known concentration in a small package. They also will pay far less for 'loose' material then a whole converter in the can because the loose material may be contaminated or have more 'filler' (debris or filler). Second problem is that even if it was profitable it would be a one time deal as what is on the roads is built up from decades. Sweep that all up and you'd be waiting decades again before you could make any profit. Automotive CCs have .5% palladium and rhodium in their mix (Platinum was actually eliminated when lead was removed from gasoline as palladium could do all the activity that platinum did). There are actually other rare each materials in CCs that are profitable to reprocess when in concentrated form (A solid unit turned in for recycling) lanthanum oxide and neodymium oxide which increase the durability.
Why the fuck do you even need them anyway? Car goes faster and sounds cooler with a straight pipe. I'm fine with one with fewer ceramic, because that's less air constrictment.
Where I live, the freeways and surface streets drain into Lake St. Clair. Any of those precious metals I would think are settling to the bottom of the lake, or are being washed down the Detroit River into Lake Erie and beyond. While it could be profitable somehow, I don't picture myself sitting at the outlet of the surface street drains panning for metal dust. It does make me wonder how many of those metals have accumulated in the lake after decades of catalytic converters.
Just found old working street sweeper for $6000 on craigslist in Akron and I own a Kiln for my glass blowing hobby should be worth millions in about 90yrs if I live that long currently 58 ... Many blessings SMR ... YOU ROCK... I promise to share any Profits
This is the one time I'm kinda happy I drive a classic Jeep without catalytic converter got to love not having emissions checks tho the thing is old enough it would probably be exempt anyways
I'm glad that you're milking the catalytic converter video. More information for us, more ad revenue for you to cover the cost of a new catalytic converter for your Honda Element.
I guess that it is possible that the metals end up along the side of the road. I remember thinking about the rubber that's abraded off of tires by travel along the roads wondering what happens to the millions of pounds of the stuff. I then came across an article (in Popular Science I think) in which it was stated that there are microbes that 'eat' the rubber dust after it 'hits the road' (sorry).
back when cc were put into exhast systems there was a aftermarket for (wink wink) test pipes. i also had a coworker who had someone hammer out there cc for better performance. which i disagrre with. minnesota dropped the emissions certification a couple years after they started realizing how stupid it was. great expense and a waste of property and nice buildings. a vehicle could drive in one day and fail and come back the next day and pass. but it was only about emission and not about brakes and safty as minnesota is pretty flat.
Great "alternative" to make some money. But because it involves a lot more labour and time most thieves will just go on stealing it in less than 3 minutes. " Gone in 60 seconds".
I wonder what percentage of the ton of debris is rubber from tires? Where the hell does it all go? Yes it's a minuscule amount per tire but when you consider millions of tires wearing down, it has to be a significant amount
Eii I think that was my comment about Cody a few videos back! I also couldn't believe it at first too! Pretty neat no? I think most of those metals do end up and collect at the side of the road or at the gutters at least especially when it rains.
It should of been a law a long time ago the converters had the vin number stamped and it was illegal to resell ones with it gone and they was to be recycled for free
So a fella could buy a used old street sweeper and drive around his county at 3 am and make a killing... *checks ebay for a streetsweeper*
lol
We'll all do the right thing and just ignore that. :)
Better deals at Ritchie Bro's
Proceeded to drive around kicking up toxic dust and slowly
Killing himself,
Helps keep streets clean of debris while mining for the precious metals. An overused phrase but it’s a “win-win” for sure!
Eric, how about mining the water runoff from city streets. Bet there is a lot of those precious metals.
Yes, and while they're at it, they should mine for lead, asbestos and worn rubber from millions of car tires.
@@starlite2092 - If true, that's rather interesting to say the least...
@@__WJK__ what did starlite say before censorship
There is already a company in France (Veolia) that does exactly what you are talking about (and has been doing so for a number of years in Europe).
Veolia is in the US as well. Not sure if they do anything like Eric is talking about, but I know they do a lot of environmental work/disposal.
Used to work for veolia..doing ReFractory all ober the place ..veolia has more companys doing different jobs than grains of sand on a beach...lol but serious they are SOOOOOOOO huge its not even funny
@@dosdahrk4504 so do they suck off the highway dirt to make a big come up?
How? Custom street sweeper? Sucker?
As soon as I loaded this video I was thinking of the Cody's Lab.
Me too, I seen it when it was uploaded.
Lol Me Too!! Crazy that Codys results had a nice grams per ton..at least the same or a tad higher than actual mines..lots of lead in freeway dirt
Yea I remember when he posted that video I was surprised he got as much as he did
Eric very interesting here in South Africa we have people who go to abandoned mines and mine for gold it is illegal yet people do so your stories of panning or mining on the side of road is not too far off thank you for sharing your wonderful videos I am from South Africa
I was going to mention Cody's old video. Props to mentioning his channel!
The video was a few years old, maybe price per ton extraction costs makes it profitable now...
Cheers,
Yep, I remembered Cody's video right away too, and yes, it wasn't worthwhile then. Maybe because of car relevance, one should pan the dust collected in the airfilter box? Cold air intakes are next to exhaust pipes all the time, so they might have a higher concentration than the average roadside dirt?
If I remember correctly wasn't the majority of material recovered platinum? Still not sure its worth it, plus probably illegal on the freeway
OEM catalytic converters in the U.S. have much much more catalyst material in them because by federal law the catalytic converters must last at least 10 yr / 120,000 miles under normal operation. Aftermarket ones do not have that requirement except in CARB states such as California and New York that do not allow aftermarket converters on California emissions cars.
Sadly nothing has really shown itself to be a viable replacement for these rare materials in a solid non consumable catalyst. The only replacement would be urea based injection using copper zeolite matrix. Diesels have to use this because diesel exhaust is much cooler, way below the operating temperatures of automotive catalysts and swing widely between rich and lean conditions as diesels are fuel throttled. Urea works for gasoline but would be another consumable people would have to buy.
The one dislike is the catalytic converter thief haha
“Life is a highway, I’m going to mine it all night long”...rascal flats/Javier 86
“Life is a highway, I’m going to mine it all night long” written by Tom Cochrane (of Red Rider fame) in 1990
I was just thinking of and humming this song look at my phone and Eric uploads this lol. And then I find this comment 🤣
@@chipfarnsworth7790 awesome group. Lunatic Fringe is my favorite song of all time. Was also my entrance song when I boxed in the Philly League. Badass for sure...
@@Whats-It-To-Ya - Mine too - hearing that intro makes every hair on my body stand up. AWESOME tune.
@javier laugh, ha, ha!
Reflective vest, wearable LED lamp, push broom, dustpan, 5 gallon bucket. A highway miner's starter set.
Thank you Eric! Today is my birthday, the cake looks delicious 😋.
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday. What flavor was your digital cake?
Trying to pay for a new cat by making videos about cats.
Genius!
Lol!
It *IS* in fact my birthday today, so thank you! Lol
Happy Birthday!
🐣🎂
And also, enjoy your digital confection!
@@bigsonarn twas digitally delicious lol
Woohoo it’s mine too lol
Great now we are going to have highway miners also it is my birthday thanks!
*Awesome channel! I made a video of my stolen catalytic converter. I have a mystery problem with my Honda Element that I also made a video of. I know Eric the Car Guy is busy so I won't bother him. If anyone wants to let me know what's wrong with my Element, please stop by and let me know. Thanks guys! Take care!* #BigMacSam
The Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter is a broken up planet.
Imagine what could be mined?
Imagine if you will a vehicle that gathers all debris from a roadway. It sorts and distinguishes the mundane from the valuble. Every so often ejecting a cube/container/package from the variety it has collected. Those of less value could be recycled by a third party. The most valuable of course would stay within the said vehicle. Think Dr.Suess! It will become so clear in the fog of your mind.
In this video, Eric petitions for even MORE road construction. As if orange barrels weren't already our state symbol.
Cody's lab on this subject was very interesting 🤔 makes you think ehat else do we just drop on roads @ETCG1
In other words if your stealing catalytic converters just go play in traffic 😉
For gold, 8 grams per ton is considered a good yield. So yes, it is economically feasible.
That’s with super heavy and fast machinery. Collecting the tons of dirt with bulldozers and conveyor belts is different than sweeping or vacuuming the roads for tons.
Cody’s Lab is really good. Glad you found it.
1:57 OMG! I guess that is why the aftermarket cat on my '05 Element is starting to hold that pending code of P0420 "catalyst efficiency below threshold bank 1". Dunno how many miles on it because I bought it with the aftermarket cat on it. I find that giving 'er the old "Italian tune up" seems to make the MIL light go away for a while.
If bad ppl clean up side of the road..? well that good right??
I observed back a few decades the sudden disintegration of the ceramic substrate that emptied out all over the highway.
This was somewhat common back in the day but the metals should still be around for collection.
great idea but it would be somehow called racist...
Alright kids time to get out on the highway and make that money!
Part of the problem with why converter become less effective over time is that the metal particles fuse together and there is now less surface area for the reactions to take place. There is also poisoning of the metals by phosphorus. And as mentioned, the metals end up going out the tail pipe. I do think that the metals fusing is the biggest issue and there is work going on on how to prevent this so they can start off with less metal. The aftermarket cats for sure use less metal and therefore have a shorter warranty. I think the OEM cat is mandated to last at least 8 years.
I would think anywhere there is a traffic light on a highway would offer the best bang for the buck. Hard acceleration up to 55 (okay 70) mph would likely spit out more material in a smaller area than just humming along a long stretch of highway. An industrial vacuum to pick up the lighter debris might do it 🤔
What about mufflers? I would imagine a muffler would almost act as a trap zone. Maybe alot is trapped inside the muffler that's usually after the catalytic converter
Thanks for sharing Eric, interesting research that you shared with us today & honestly you gave a new idea to the emissons regulating authorities😉
Stay Safe👍
Aight imma just start vacuuming the highways
Shit, now roads are going to be stolen...
Ok, when I read "Mining the Highway?" I was like, WHAT? Landmines for speeders or something??!?! Clearly I need more sleep. :D
Might be more profitable to “mine” in an area with a high amount of bumper to bumper traffic. I would think that would lead to a higher concentration of precious metals per ton.
In that case, I-66 and I-495 are probably platinum mines.
Interesting topic @ETCG1
They already strip the roads every so often to fix them, would just have to haul everything to get processed better. Not a bad idea.
They should just use a sweeper with a sifter on it to remove The Big chunks of Rock and just save the fine powder dirt.
I've always thought some garbage dumps from the 80s and 90s where technology was moving so fast and everything was going to the dump full of precious metals would be a good investment to mine.
Now yo have opened Pandora's box,lol the highways will now go missing as of this video....lol
As you're mining, listen to: The Highwaymen: Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson.
I'll be there.
My Monday can now begin. Thank your for your insight.
I literally live a block away from a major interstate. Looks like it's time to get to mining, lol.
One time I found a grill on the side of the road.
Easier & A HELL OF A LOT CHEAPER THEN TRYING TO MINE THE HIGHWAYS. Imagine the cost involved doing this with State workers, NOT WORTH IT.
I found a snowblower once, came back minutes later to someone trying to load it in there trunk
@@TheAirSofterblaster200 THAT SUCKS, for you. That's the way it seems to go for me also though.
I find tools. Lots of tools. I call it my job lol.
I got a Carrier Tech 2000 style A/C condensing unit, which is now hooked up and cools my house. I'm guessing someone was hauling it in for scrap and it fell off the truck or trailer.
The ditches left from mining will be a bitch when having to pull over ;-)
Who needs the shoulders.
There’s probably 12 Grams in each parking spot!
This was my ideal ten plus years ago. Did guy you hear about from happen to be dav? From michigan?
I was walking down a sidewalk and looked to my left to see a large blackish area of dirt? And after a moment I knew what I was looking at.
It was a large mass of black soot from where semi's had cleaned their stacks. The parking lot they parked in was concentrating this material in one small location and also filling the drain with it that was beside it.
Since then I've been refining this material.
Every 70k miles a semi must clean their stacks manually or automatically or their engines will not operate right. Well they are creating a gold mine in parking lots!
i thought the same thing when i first saw Codys' video a few week ago. why don't they mine the roads to recycle these metals? Cody has a great channel. been watching him for years.
I always want cake after watching ETCG
Hurray for cake!
I'm always thinking of my time under the hood and his line "Stay Dirty", so eating a cake with greasy hands just... isn't... appealing...
😄👍
@@tyree9055 a little 5w-20 adds flavor 😂
In other news.
Police are baffled by the huge digs occuring on America's roads. From hi-ways to city roads. Authorities advise drivers to slow down amd watch out for these holes popping up all over the country.
This situation appears to have had quite an affect on you. From the ashes my friend......(cue theme ,sans dialog,from battle of the planets)
I remember the old Gold Fever show featured a guy in LA who would sweep the dust out of curbs nearest the river and mountains in CA and would recover a very impressive amount of placer gold. Granted it was exceptionally fine and not commercially viable but for a hobby, a pretty lucrative one.
Not commercially viable? Umm dont they just melt it all
Gold Fever with Tom Massie on the outdoor channel. He is a legend
Replacement CATs don't have to meet the same standards as OEM CATs even though the EPA mandates the same 50k miles\5 year warranty for both. The OEM CATs are only required to meet EPA performance standards for 25k miles vs 50k miles for OEM.
I don't know about platinum, but as a avid cyclist I could fill a tool boxwith tool I've found on the road in four decades.
That's how I got half the tools I have in my tool box. Some from the road and parking lots, some from the local junkyard.
Where do all those tools you lose working on car or truck end up.
@@markschmalenberger8301 Hopefully back into the tool box but sometime I do forget to put them back and they get left at the junkyard or left outside somewhere.
You all
Should realize.
If this stuff is in the side of the road.
Is because it was in the air.
Like when you drive behind other cars.....
When you drive in front of someone....
Be aware
Catalytic converter thieves as moving targets alongside the highway😂😂😂😂😂
There are 28.35 grams per ounce. If we take the figure you posted in this video ($1214.82) and divide it by 28.35 we get the per gram amount of $42.85. Now multiply it by 6.7 for the grams found in a ton of debris and you get $287.10 per ton of debris processed. There's not a whole lot of profit there right now, no matter how you cut it, though it is food for thought.
I thought about buying a street sweeper machine and mounting the equipment to something larger and vacuuming up every side street in my city.... then working outward...
The amount of effort to make to mine freeway dust may not equal the pay off - yet! But if there is a business model- there is a business- right?!?
Oh FYI I LOVE CODYS LAB!
It is the 100,000++ manufacturers CAT that cost a small fortune vs. aftermarket one that will last a fraction of that . Since most people drive 10K a year the aftermarket works for most people.
no need to be vulgar
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suck
4 slang, sometimes vulgar : to be objectionable or inadequate
If you got a contract to clean the highways for the government, no talk of extraction or whatever then you have a company that is paid to mine this relatively easy to vaccume up and store dust what whatever, I'm. Sure you could out it though some multi layered shakers and work out what particles are too big to counts in anything.
I think now it would be profibale to mine from the side of the roads especially in nations with alot of road usage like the US, cheaper labour could be better but you could hire illigals.
Its very rare to see a car in the US that has an Engine under 2L I know a few modern hybrid cars or small turbo cars may have them but they are realy for the euro market.
Most cars and trucks maybe 98% run on petrol and I would assume the average engine size would be around 3L or more.
Bigger engines need bigger cats so more metals, diesels just have anti smog stuff and I'm not sure if they have any peciouse metals.
I was born in the UK and every car I had was a Trubo diesel that was remapped with a bigger turbo, Injectors and an intercooler, sometimes I would have to put a better gearbox and clutch that could handle it from the scrap yard but most of the good ones are made by the VAG group, audi, WV, seat and Skoda.
You could get 80% more torque and 50% more HP with a simple remap.
My first car was before the PD or common rail Injectors so I could run the car off anything that was an oil and was filtered well and had no water in and not too thin.
I would usualy choose realy light and small cars as less weight and remove as much weight as I could.
I had a methanol/water spray system I made out if scrap for the intercoolers, I think nearly all the parts I used cost very little as they where from wrecked cars but still good the only real money I had to spend was if I needed something custom made for example a manifold or turbo adapter or something like that but it would not cost much. I was thankful as my friend worked for a remapping place.
I changed so much stuff and protected slot of stuff from heat.
The exasut was just a straight pipe, sounded like a sherman tank
I would go see a friend in the airport and get used hydraulic fluid and some waste kerosine, the used hydraulic fluid was very clean.
I would use 2 Stoke oil, farmers tax free red diesel.
Cheap rectified machine oil
Engine oil. Used engine oil filtered with an electromagnet then a centrefuge and then alot of filters then remove any water but most used engine oil was fine.
New vegetable oil was fine in the summer and so was used vegetable oil that was filtered and water removed, it would not run in the winter unless syou had a second heated tank and heated fuel lines.
You could mess around with chemicals to make it fine in all weather conditions but I never bothered.
Most of the time I would use red farming/marine/heating diesel that used to be high sulper and ran so much better than regular road diesel but it was illigal as no or low tax. Now its the standard stuff and much more expensive.
Used hydraulic fluid from aircraft worked amazing and passenger jets changed it often so it was clean and per plane it was quite a lot, they usualy had to pay people to dispose of that, I was lucky that my local airport replaced engines and stuff for airbus so they did alot of standard maintance on both airbus and boeing.
When kerosine jet fuel was cheap I would mix it with cheap rebated oil, 2 Stoke or realy cheap engine oil until it was slightly thicker than diesel.
Sometimes 2 Stoke oil was half the price of diesel at the pumps.
Even less if you got it in bulk.
I did use used veg and motor oil but it was so dirty to mess around with, you could tell what type of food it was from the exhaust.
Maybe 60% of road vehicles are diesel in Europe and they have not made or imported vans or picksups that run on petrol since the early 90s, you never see them apart from at car shows, I'm not sure why in the US they don't have a diesel instead of a big v6 or v8 as if your hauling the torque and mpg a diesel gives you is so much better and the engines are made crazy strong.
My father when we was alive had some classic cars and bikes he would have his daily driver, a fast Japanese import bike, then a Classic car and usualy an old British bike like a triumph or BSA. He would often change them out but he would always convert the car to LPG (liquid propane) for a car powered car it was very very easy to is tall you had a tank in the trunk and run a line to the front then you would have a LPG carb that went under the standard carb but inside the car you would have a switch, you would usualy start the car with petrol and then change to LPG, LPG is pretty high octsone and used to be over half the price of petrol.
An LPG system for fuel injection or at least fuel injection with a cat is more involved but still worth it as its the only ecenomical way to drive a car with a large engine in the UK and many nations.
In the UK petrol and diesel are around £2 for 1l with diesel being about 10p higher thanks Russia.
LPG, gas for cooking and heating and the price of eletrisoty have all doubled or more since and its kind of funny as electric cars are not that much cheaper to drive now compared to a car with a good MPG, you save the most on the yearly tax.
People think electric cars pollute nothing.
Battery tech is awfull and solor in the UK is dumb and does not save much if your whole roof is solar, wind turbines work but only when it's windy.
Geothermal is too expensive and solar water pipes may work 1 or 2 months our or the year.
They want to ban the sales of all fossil fuel cars by 2030 and pullute nothing by 2050 but the UK pullute less than 1% in the globes as no real heavy industry and its a tiny nation.
It's hurting the normal person so much as half of these bills for electric and gas go for carbon tax and green whatever tax they made up.
For the UK and many nations the best idea is going nuclear, epseciakybin places that don't experience natural disasters like the UK, we could build them on many of the islands we have or in the middle of nowhere, plenty of that, new reactor designs especially the smaller ones are much safer and eceomical, you can use reinriched fuel rods that are alot cheaper and many of the smaller plants are modular, completely automated, can store used rods until they are picked up for enrichment, and can take less than a year to build.
Alor of smaller nearly all closed reactors are safer than a huge one.
Also you could have plants a safe distance away from the power plant and humans that could use pretty much any type of water that's been filtered and turn it into hydrogen with the only byproduct being oxygen it would be much more effixiat to have it closer to the plant due to eletrical resistance.
Then they could make an underground pipe system so you can refuel your car and heat your home and cook with the only byproduct being water.
You could pretty much convert any petrol or diesel engine to run on it, similar to LPG, with diesel you would need some oil for lubrication but only a little and could be synthetic.
I'm not anti renewable but it just won't happen with the tech we have and the battery tech we have, I hope cold fusion can happen in my life time.
Got $250 for a bad one I cut off a Mazda pickup from Rockaway recycling in New Jersey
Is it? Is it filled? I took apart an oem suzuki cat. There were 2 "discs" of cat-material in there. Ok... the aftermarket cat had just one, but the oem cat wasn't filled with a solid piece of cat-material.
Re the potential for the "roadside mining" of platinum, palladium & rhodium, they should mine for lead & asbestos as well...
On a side note... let this be a lesson to never eat anything edible growing alongside heavily traveled roads and highways(!)
And I still remember a stupid dumb ass person where I live I had to put a new cat in a Chevy cobalt and I wanted to recycle it and I asked how much would it be they answered "oh depends on the car" then I'm like...... Well I know what car it's from can I just tell you that? Then they were like "oh my person that knows here left for the day" it was fricken 2 in the afternoon and they closed at 5.... then I asked well what the rate then then they responded "oh it's like $1 to $100" kind of estimate is that?!??!! I said eff it going in the trash I was looking for like at least 25 bucks off it maybe 20 but I know they would give me the dollar so yeah trash oh and that was 3 years ago.
a ton of gravel is equal to one cubic yard, if Cody's correct that would hold roughly $400 of platinum. if that were actual dirt in a mine, it would be considered very rich ground!
Problem with 'mining' roads for it is first the reagent costs to process the tiny amounts from the sweepings and the labor cost to sweep so much of the highway will make it non profitable. CC reprocessing is profitable because you have a fairly known concentration in a small package. They also will pay far less for 'loose' material then a whole converter in the can because the loose material may be contaminated or have more 'filler' (debris or filler).
Second problem is that even if it was profitable it would be a one time deal as what is on the roads is built up from decades. Sweep that all up and you'd be waiting decades again before you could make any profit. Automotive CCs have .5% palladium and rhodium in their mix (Platinum was actually eliminated when lead was removed from gasoline as palladium could do all the activity that platinum did). There are actually other rare each materials in CCs that are profitable to reprocess when in concentrated form (A solid unit turned in for recycling) lanthanum oxide and neodymium oxide which increase the durability.
Reminds me of that guy Rocky from NYC that mines the sidewalks of the gold and diamond district on West 47th st. to make a living!
Collect and process a ton of roadside to get $250 worth of platinum?
Doesn't seem like that could be close to profitable.
Why the fuck do you even need them anyway? Car goes faster and sounds cooler with a straight pipe. I'm fine with one with fewer ceramic, because that's less air constrictment.
Where I live, the freeways and surface streets drain into Lake St. Clair. Any of those precious metals I would think are settling to the bottom of the lake, or are being washed down the Detroit River into Lake Erie and beyond. While it could be profitable somehow, I don't picture myself sitting at the outlet of the surface street drains panning for metal dust. It does make me wonder how many of those metals have accumulated in the lake after decades of catalytic converters.
Just found old working street sweeper for $6000 on craigslist in Akron and I own a Kiln for my glass blowing hobby should be worth millions in about 90yrs if I live that long currently 58 ... Many blessings SMR ... YOU ROCK... I promise to share any Profits
This is the one time I'm kinda happy I drive a classic Jeep without catalytic converter got to love not having emissions checks tho the thing is old enough it would probably be exempt anyways
I'm glad that you're milking the catalytic converter video. More information for us, more ad revenue for you to cover the cost of a new catalytic converter for your Honda Element.
The after market parts company put the bare minimum Metals in the converters just to work and last long enough.
Is you catalytic converter getting plugged up? I have found that a circular hole saw and a drill bit extender will work wonders on unplugging it.
I guess that it is possible that the metals end up along the side of the road. I remember thinking about the rubber that's abraded off of tires by travel along the roads wondering what happens to the millions of pounds of the stuff. I then came across an article (in Popular Science I think) in which it was stated that there are microbes that 'eat' the rubber dust after it 'hits the road' (sorry).
The cops here raided a yard and found 300 converters. The crimal involved is called the smelter. But he's still at large.
America, where the streets are paved with gold, errr.... dusted with platinum and palladium
back when cc were put into exhast systems there was a aftermarket for (wink wink) test pipes. i also had a coworker who had someone hammer out there cc for better performance. which i disagrre with. minnesota dropped the emissions certification a couple years after they started realizing how stupid it was. great expense and a waste of property and nice buildings. a vehicle could drive in one day and fail and come back the next day and pass. but it was only about emission and not about brakes and safty as minnesota is pretty flat.
my friends daughter just had her two converters stolen off her Prius. Her car was parked in a gated parking garage on the second floor.
You might have started The 2021 platinum/palladium rush.
Great "alternative" to make some money. But because it involves a lot more labour and time most thieves will just go on stealing it in less than 3 minutes. " Gone in 60 seconds".
I wonder what percentage of the ton of debris is rubber from tires? Where the hell does it all go? Yes it's a minuscule amount per tire but when you consider millions of tires wearing down, it has to be a significant amount
6.7g per ton (2000 lbs). That is basically nothing.
So, if I have a stock cat, should cut it off and sell it, then get an aftermarket replacement?
The episode you referred to, was the very first Cody’s Lab video I watched.
Government taxing (especially in Cali and NY state) has been mining us clean for decades !
Great. Now criminals will be tearing up our roads.
I needed a new muffler installed and the muffler shop removed mine and kept it.
Young Sheldon did an episode about highway mining.
Eii I think that was my comment about Cody a few videos back! I also couldn't believe it at first too! Pretty neat no? I think most of those metals do end up and collect at the side of the road or at the gutters at least especially when it rains.
Currently platinum is 37.68 per gram
Money for Infrastructure?
So we can send the money to other countries to fix their roads and bridges?
I don’t go out stealing cats but I might just start sweeping the streets lol
You can tie a thief to a couple of horses and they will pull the thievery right out of em! Cured pretty much instantly and with zero relapse rate
Eric The Catalytic-converter Guy1
Now we may see stretches of highway missing or torn up over night
So the trick to keeping your cat is to make it look like a cheap knock-off
Did anyone else read "Mining" like "laying mines"?
It should of been a law a long time ago the converters had the vin number stamped and it was illegal to resell ones with it gone and they was to be recycled for free