Copper Wire Recycling
hey guys my name is jason with mount baker mining and metals and on today's video we're going to be running a waste stream from a big copper chopping processor from sweden through our turnkey pcb system the hammer mill and the shaker table and we're going to see how much additional copper we can recover so this customer sent four different samples and this is the first one i unboxed and it looks like it's just chopped up insulation from copper wire but here's some analysis they had done on this stuff and they're interested in the copper here and that's 11 kilograms per ton so it's 1.1 percent copper so i'm going to go through i'll show you how i process all these samples first thing is we got to get a weight on this stuff so we can figure out the recovery percentage we got and then we'll run it through our shaker table and weigh the copper at the end here's our sample this is the number one sample i'm going to try and do everything in kilograms here this weighs nine kilograms as it is but the bucket i weighed before weighs exactly one kilogram so we have eight kilograms worth of material here so for these samples that are already chopped up i can just run them directly on the shaker table and for eight kilograms at 1.1 copper we're looking at about 88 grams or so of recovery is what we're shooting for so i'm going to get the shaker table wipe down cleaned off we're going to run the sample on the shaker table all the copper is going to come across here and down into the number one and number two port over here so i'll get this thing fired up and we'll see how it goes all right here's our number one sample i've mixed it with water and i'm going to take just a little bit of soap put some soap in there and then i'm going to mix it around with a paint stirrer on a drill and get all mixed up and try and break any of that oil that's on that i know it has a lot of oil and then over here i got the shaker table set up and for those of you who haven't seen this before this is the goofiest looking thing in the world but it works really really well so what i found is running this copper chop stuff the copper either is hydrophobic and wants to float because it's so fine or has oil on it and this super super light plastic sheet breaks the surface tension of the water and makes the copper sink down into the grooves and then it can travel over the number one a lot of you have left comments about putting a bunch of surfactant in the water over there i've tried that it works for a little while and then you just have to keep adding more and more and more and more and it it can get really expensive if you're running on a production scale this stuff even though it looks crazy goofy it's pretty much free no maintenance and it just it works really well it drops all the copper down in the grooves and works its way over here into the number one i've got the shaker table brushed off as best i can i've got number one and number two concentrates this is the number three midlings which i don't expect hardly any copper and then all the light plastic and insulation is going to go down into number four all the water in this system is recirculated so there's a little pump over there and it just pumps onto the shaker table drains down into the the little settling pond and just recirculates all the water i've done the same thing with ore when it comes in really super dry and it's powdered because you just mix it with water and this paint stirrer works really well for mixing it up and turning it into a slurry because feeding dry material onto the shaker table does not work very well it all just wants to float float off the table and you're not getting any separation you really need to get it wetted and get it all nice and wet so it goes and sinks down onto the chafing table okay there we go let's start feeding this stuff okay i'll show you here i i kind of screwed up i usually have this plastic piece on the over there and the white plastic piece over here so i'm going to switch those well take a look here i'm not real happy with the way this plastic's working right now i mean it works good but anywhere there's a little wrinkle or something seems like the insulation gets caught up underneath so i might run to the hardware store and get a sheet that's six feet wide and you know 10 feet long and cover the whole table in a single sheet because this one's been kind of stretched and pinched and stuff but the insulation is working underneath really nice you can see where it's underneath the the plastic and then here's all the copper coming across and 88 grams is not very much so i think we we did pretty good here but let me get let me get this cleaned off i'll get all the copper down into the number one and number two there there isn't hardly anything in number three to speak of and a lot of the insulation insulation's going down there you can see here's a quick shot this is the the concentrates and you can see that line of copper just running right up under the water bar so it's working pretty darn good i'm taking the number two and re-run it on the shaker table here to clean it up that early run kind of got a bunch of insulation stuff down in it so i'm just kind of trying to get it cleaned up and help it along here you can just dribble it up here right under the water bar and all that insulation kind of works its way down and then the copper comes clean all right i got a bucket here it's zeroed on the scale here's our number one which is you know pretty much pure copper well the number one has 85 grams of copper in it so that's pretty good we pretty much hit our 1.1 percent right there and the number two has 45 grams of mostly copper i'd say that's 90 percent at least the insulation there's some in there you can see it but it doesn't weigh very much so i call that 40 40 grams of copper so what's at 85 and 40 is 125 grams well according to my math on that one we got 1.56 1.6
recovery of copper uh so we're actually better than the analysis that they had done on i'm assuming a small a small sample um so that's that's pretty encouraging and and you can you can slide that scale say oh there's 10 more crap in there or oh there's you know we lost some on the table or whatever you want to say but we recovered better than the analysis so i'm pretty happy with that well i got a painters tarp in the hardware store this is a half mil sheet so it's the lightest thinnest plastic that i could find and it just floats right on the top of the water you can see it's all one piece i've kind of tried to get it as smooth as i can um so we'll we'll give it a shot here and you know this is the fun part for me this is this is improvement in real time you're seeing what i'm trying trying to improve the system a little bit if it doesn't work we all learn from it if it works then we all have the knowledge and we can all improve our systems wherever we we can with this kind of technology so hopefully this helps somebody out there and hopefully it works let's see how it goes well here's the number two sample this is what we're going to run next and this is just loaded with copper and it looks like aluminum flakes they're all really fine but coming over here and looking at the the sample form here i think that's 27 percent copper and then aluminum up here is 16 aluminum so there's a significant amount of metal in here we will see how the shaker table handles it all right we got number two on there it weighs right about nine and a half so we'll say eight and a half kilograms of material and there you go see i poured water in there and look at all this stuff floating i mean it's just so hydrophobic we got to get it under that sheet and sink it and mix it with a paint stirrer i'm going to try and do two things at once here try and run the shaker table and film at the same time but you can see in the distributor trough there's a bunch of stuff that floats even with all the soap i put in there but as soon as it gets down under the under the sheet it just all drops out the copper is coming across the aluminum is coming down into the number three and then all this fine insulation is going down into the number four but that caught look at it just coming out the first groove bam shooting right down into the number one that's cool let me get a little more of this bucket run i just started that's the first couple scoops but this stuff is super fine super small particles i don't know if this is like the the dust their air classifying system sucked up or what but i think they're having a real hard time classifying out the copper and there's you know there's loads of it like i said 27 or something so what's that we should get uh two kilograms four pounds of copper out of this stuff man it's running nice on the table big bands of copper let's come down here and take a look it hasn't quite got all the way down here yet but i think what's going to happen is the copper is running all down into the number one the aluminum once it gets out of these long grooves can't come across the table so it comes down right now it's coming into the number two i don't know keep it down it's coming down into the number two here but i think you're seeing the copper come down here and as soon as there's more copper then these grooves can handle it's gonna come down here and it's gonna start pushing copper into the number two you can kind of see it already it's starting to turn a little copper colored and that'll push the aluminum down into the number three i don't know if i can grab it but see there that's pretty much all aluminum so it's working pretty nice let me keep feeding it so i can stay consistent we'll take a look at what we got so here's something i just saw while i was running around the sheet knocks it down but as soon as it gets into the air again it starts to float and so it was i came down here and i looked and my number one concentrating cup here was about let's see what am i trying to say the water level was below the pipe and so the copper would fall down and float and you can see all this little fine copper that's floated out of the number one but now that i have the water level and that pipe goes down and it submerges underneath the the bucket i don't know am i making any sense i think so now the copper even though it's floating it's it's captured and as soon as it goes under the water then it's caught into the number one i'll move that brick over and get the number two as well see what happens when i look under this sheet oh yeah i like copper it's just it's just thick there's some aluminum getting up there surprisingly a little band of aluminum right here there must be some harmonic or something like a standing wave where the aluminum can hang out but tons of big band of aluminum pretty much all going down into the number three here copper going down to the number one at this point the number two is mostly copper that's working pretty good here's our number three there's a little bit floating off the number three bucket not a ton there's definitely some metal floating on top of our settling pond again not a ton but you can see it here's the band of copper we finished got solid copper from the water bar all the way across to the ramp and the table the aluminum is coming down here into the number three pretty good separation there we're getting a pile of copper here looks pretty clean i don't really know how clean it needs to be but it's kind of cool having a target i mean most people send the samples and they say well recover as much copper as you can get and these guys have done their analysis and they know how much copper's in there and we're trying to match that bar so that's kind of cool i'm excited to see how much weight we have in the number one and number two here and then i'll weigh the number three as well since that's mostly metal and i found that you get the plastic right to the edge if you hang it way over down here stuff piles up on the on the corner because that plastic pulls down and makes pinches right there so you got to have it just kind of right at the edge all the way across and then here you can see in the bubbles a bunch of coppers coming up in the bubbles fine copper powder so like i say even even though it's it's under the surface of the water as soon as it hits a surface the copper starts floating again so that's kind of interesting same with the aluminum here float well work our way backwards this is the number three and it is mostly aluminum there's a little copper flake every once in a while but there's a significant amount of aluminum in there so that's where most of the aluminum went here's the number two and probably by weight there's a significant amount of copper in there it looks like it's about half and half but i think that means that there's about 75 percent by weight copper more or less so there's that now go look at the number one and here is the number one stuff this is you know pretty much pure copper some tinned wires in there you might see a little bit of gray but i don't see hardly any aluminum it's pretty much pure copper okay so we're looking for about two kilograms of copper i think if i remember right about 25 the thing weighs the tub weighs 30 grams wow so 2.9 kilograms that's 2 900 grams in the number one the number two weighs 630 grams and so call that 500 grams of copper let's call this one 2 800 grams of copper so that's 3.3 kilograms of copper well my math on that one says we're about 38 39 copper i did 3.3 divided by 8.5 and ended up with about 39 percent
so again quite a bit more than what the analysis report had to say uh and and there again you can you can adjust that 10 percent lower because you know maybe it's still a little wet or maybe there's a little more aluminum in there than i thought or maybe there's some tin um but i mean we're we're 50 on on both the samples we've run so far 50 percent greater than the analysis so even if we're 25 percent greater there's a significant amount more copper in there than what the analysis is talking about that we're recovering on the shaker table so that's all good news and again this one that we just weighed uh 30 seconds ago was the box number two that real fine stuff so now we'll keep going and run the next two samples here's number five and this is a lot of really fluffy fluffy stuff like paper and string and real light insulation so it'll be interesting to see how this stuff runs but here's the analysis they got about 10 percent copper in this one 100 000 milligrams per metric ton i think is how i'm reading that but anyway 10 copper so let's see if we can keep going with our our uh our results and get maybe 15 copper out of it for him and nine and a half kilograms in number five so his number five is kind of interesting there's a lot more insulation and fluff and it's just migrating its way down into the number four there's a little bit of aluminum flake some larger flakes coming across but they're all going down into the number two you can see them cascading down here and here and then the copper's coming across the large grooves over under the water bar so this was kind of interesting we on the first two we had a lot more insulation coming down to number three and this stuff is light enough it's going into the number four here's the number one from sample five pretty much pure copper mostly fine wire in this stuff some little flakes this thing weighs 24 grams so we recover right about 300 grams of copper there this is the number two some of those big aluminum flakes made it down in there but that's mostly copper by weight i'd say 90 this one weighs 36 grams and then take another i don't know 10 15 percent off so call it about 200 grams of copper there so interestingly enough on this number five sample we ended up with about 500 grams of copper when the report said that we were looking for about uh 950 at 10 by weight so we came in a little light on number five here all right so now for the next sample number four i'm gonna run it down through the hammer mill because it's got some chunks of stuff in it i wanna break it up get it all fluid and so it can all separate out the shaker table and i'm gonna run it down through this hammer mill down the gooseneck into this chamber where there's a bunch of hammers that go around there break it all up and there's a screen that runs the bottom half of the hammer mill it's got a about a point eight millimeter slot in it and as that stuff gets small enough it'll go through the hammer mill and down this trough onto the shaker table i run it wet so there's water pumped up into the hammer mill to keep the dust down keep everything fluid so a nice slurry goes down onto the shaker table i'm going to keep the plastic on it just to see how it works and we'll get running this number four sample and here's number four this looks like i don't know mud or sludge or something that has dried out obviously and it's kind of little crumbles but you can break them up and see it's that real fine stuff um so we'll be interested to see what this comes out with but here on this one supposedly it's 47 copper which is a ton that's a bunch a bunch of bunch of copper so we'll run it through the hammer mill and see what we can recover on the table with the hammer mill it's going to be a little bit tricky to get a real accurate recovery rate because i can't guarantee that all the copper comes out of that chamber you know there's little corners and stuff so we're gonna have to kind of estimate what we got when it runs down on the shaker table over into the number one and number two it weighs 10 kilograms so that's ends up being nine well we're finishing off number four here and something interesting happened when i turned the hammer mill on the little bit of soap i used to mix up with the buckets started getting pumped up into the hammer mill and it started frothing like crazy and big blobs of soap suds and stuff started forming underneath our our plastic sheet i don't think it hurt anything i mean here's one kind of left over it just it's they're just bubble soap bubbles but it was kind of a shock so maybe that's a reason not to use i mean i think jet dry is a real common one it doesn't suds up and soap up but i learned that we've definitely got some copper coming still and i can tell you right now there's no way that stuff is 47 copper or at least the stuff i recovered uh just because it it doesn't weigh enough it's not heavy enough that bucket was i don't know two-thirds full or something and you can see the amount of copper we got here there might be a kilogram you might have 15 but there's you know it just didn't it didn't weigh enough it didn't weigh enough to be half copper for that volume of stuff and here's our number one and number two from the number four sample um okay so we've got 1500 take off 26 or whatever for the jug we've got 1500 grams of pretty much pure copper and then this i don't know that's probably about half copper by weight 36 for the thing two so probably about 200 200 grams of copper here and like i showed you on the first sample you can take this and upgrade it on the shaker table again to get pure copper or or a much higher percentage but estimating we got 1700 grams of copper off the number four sample and according to my math 1700 grams divided by 9000 grams is right around 19 percent copper so uh yeah i i something something doesn't feel right on that sample uh just because that that bucket was so full and and didn't weigh very much the density wasn't there so i'm thinking there might be some mix up with the analysis on that one but we still recovered about 20 copper so that's uh that's pretty good there's still quite a bit of value in there well here's sample number three and this is the the junk of the junk here you got you know big chunks of i don't know what that is it feels like lead almost rocks wire harnesses and there's there's really not very much here i have the wrong screen in the hammer mill to run this stuff what you really want to do is you want to take this stuff and run it through a pretty big screen break it all up and then run it finer but uh i'll try running this stuff through like i said there's not very much weight and we'll see if we can recover some copper out of this stuff there's no analysis paper with this one so we're just going to figure out how much we get but i mean yeah it just looks like dirt and rocks and plastic and glass and and junk so we'll run it see what we get well what i've done is i've screened this through a half inch screen because that that stuff can easily go through the hammer mill uh some of this bigger stuff i'm gonna pick out you know these bigger chunks of whatever that and there's nothing wrong with that but it just takes forever to grind up in the hammer mill to go through a small slot slotted screen what you'd really want to do with this stuff is you might want to screen it first i don't know chunks of glass but screen it first and you want to run the overs through one of our scrap systems with like a half inch screen or three quarter inch screen break all this up and then run it under a magnet one of our mag belts up through the conveyor but like there's a there's a ball bearing or something it's steel it's heavy that that just sits in the hammer mill forever so you want to get as much of this big stuff out crushed up finer before you run it through uh a small screen and onto a shaker table so this stuff's going through the hammer mill this is the stuff i picked out just the big pieces big pieces of plastic some of the bigger rocks the hammer mill can handle them but you know why that ball bearing so i picked that stuff out i actually probably while the hammer is running i'll strip this stuff with a trim knife get the copper out of it and then we'll add that to the pile let's get this weighed and run through the hammer mill well we're at just under five so call it what three and a half uh so okay here's the number one and then i actually there's so little of the number two i clean it up in the table and put it in here so we've got number one and number two clean copper take off i don't know round figures 43 for the tub you got 850 grams of copper out of the number three that that auto shred residue and then i don't know i'm i was going to add this in this is the stuff i hand stripped from the bigger pieces because i mean by rights that that goes in there with that copper so when you put it all together you've got about a kilogram so what's that from three and a half kilos that's uh a third thirty percent thirty percent copper by weight for sample number three that's pretty good all right guys we ran all five of those samples i hope you guys enjoyed the running of the samples as well as the results some pretty interesting results there hope the customer is going to be happy with the recovery we got with the shaker table and hammer mill so if you guys are interested in any of the equipment you saw today either the hammer mill or the shaker table processing copper chops or copper chop waste let me know email phone number and website should be there so reach out if you have any questions thanks for watching and we'll see you guys in the next video
2022-08-22 20:17
