This Business Insider video on gold recycling just came out on Youtube.
I haven't even finished watching it yet, because the opening minute uses footage of African city junkyards to repeat perposterous claims that African are using a toxic leachate chemical process to extract gold from circuit boards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yGPm1U7U6s
Look, if you are claiming to make a engineering or scientific breakthrough, don't start with a blatantly false and discredited claim. I've been visiting African scrapyards for years.
The gold bearing printed-circuit boards that come from hand-demanufacture and disassembly (an honorable process, superior to Western "Big Shred" machines designed to avoid labor) are sorted by type and either a) reused in ubiquitous repair shops in Africa, or b) sold to Chinese buyers who harvest integrated chips from the boards for remanufacturing (e.g. into lower scale toys and appliances).
The whole "acid bath" claim was bogus since Guiyu reporting in 2002. The claims made about Agbogbloshie and other African dumps (that they import EU and USA electronics for scrap, rather than collect from generators in African cities after decades of re-use) were disproven by multiple research papers over the past 10 years.
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@BusinessInsider is ordinarily a great journalism organization, and the rest of the story may be quite interesting aside from the postulation that white people have better processes.
