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Old August 5, 2014, 03:32 PM   #31
BobCat45
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Join Date: May 18, 2004
Location: East Bernard, TX
Posts: 523
Ok this is so off-topic that it will get deleted, but before that happens:

I had a Metallurgy professor who claimed landfills would be the next mining boom. Dig the landfill up, put it (bit by bit over time) into a huge ceramic-lined vessel, leach it with HCl, and a lot of what you'd get would be mixed metal chlorides in aqueous solution.

Dry them, melt them, and condense the individual metal chlorides out - like fractional distillation but at much higher temperatures. They all melt at different temperatures, vaporize/condense at unique temperatures, so they are separable.

Now you have pure iron chloride, aluminum chloride, cupric / cuperous chloride, lead chloride, tin chloride, and so forth. These can be reduced (by electrowinning or other extractive techniques) to pure metals for re-use.

His point was that there is no point in the chain where it is "too late" to recycle / re-mine these elements, as long as they are not physically dispersed (like, shredded and scattered). Having them in a landfill is like money in the bank.
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