 When you think of electronics manufacturing in Asia, understandably there are a lot of words that probably pop into your mind. Toxic chemicals, air pollution, hazardous waste, e-waste, heavy metals. And you know what? These are real problems that anyone with half a brain can hopefully agree that we need to solve. So then, what is being done on the small island nation of Taiwan where according to the economist, 40% of their annual exports are electronic devices manufactured by companies like Asus, HTC and Acer. To find out, we went about an hour out of the city to sit down and chat with Mr. Stan Su, the president of Su's Recycling Technology Inc. Our environmental NG can also see the non-polymerization process of carbon-free carbon-free mining. It is also a cycle. The cycle of the economy is very important globally. Cooler Master's 25th Anniversary Edition Cosmos 2 features a unique dual curved tempered glass side panel. Check it out now at the link below. In circuit board manufacturing, as in baking, there is always some leftover material when the finished product is cut out. But unlike baking, you can't just fold it up and cut again. So what do you do? To answer that, SRTI was kind enough to take us deep inside the bowels of one of their four facilities here in Taoyuan, Taiwan, where they're using techniques created in collaboration with several universities under the supervision of the Environmental Protection Bureau to extract valuable metals like gold, silver and platinum from leftovers so they can be reused instead of ending up in a landfill or a pile in a developing country somewhere. And the goal is to do this in the most ecologically responsible way possible. So some of the e-waste coming in the door takes a pretty familiar form. Printed circuit boards, integrated circuits and the like. These get picked up from partners, shredded right in front of the partners to protect their valuable intellectual property, and then the shreds get placed into these stainless steel cages. They're round so that they can be spun around like a clothes dryer to optimize contact with the solvent that you have got to be kidding me. Cyanide? Immediately I was like, is that safe? And they were like, of course not. What a stupid question. That's why we have these gas detectors, fume hoods and goofy clothes. So anyway, the crane grabs the cage and submerges it in the cyanide, spins it around and then as little as three to four minutes later, depending on the elements in the waste, it can be pulled out, washed, cooled, dried and then opened to reveal some scraps from LED production. So what you see here is a stripped gold copper alloy. Any exposed gold has actually been dissolved into the cyanide. So it gets put into these one ton drums for further processing. But we'll come back to that a little bit later. First, we need to take a look at some of the e-waste that you might not recognize as potentially valuable. These bags are full of cloths that were used to clean electronic parts during manufacturing. So they pick up trace amounts of valuable metals like aluminum, silver and maybe even gold that can be extracted by the coolest means possible with fire. But burning these cloths normally would release toxic and environmentally harmful chemicals called dioxins. So that's where the furnace, as it's been nicknamed, comes in. Unlike some crude burn barrel, it uses two combustion chambers, a primary one to burn down the fabric and melt metals like silver and a secondary chamber that takes the exhaust and turns it up to around a thousand degrees Celsius to destroy the dioxins, then rapidly drops the temperature down to 200 degrees Celsius to prevent them from reforming. This process can yield as much as a kilogram of silver per hundred kilograms of cloth and a lot of ash that can actually be used for concrete production. The remnants from the burning process come with us to the next station. They're heated up in a titanium container in a king's water bath. This mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid dissolves gold and platinum, but not the other so-called noble metals. Then anything that we don't need gets filtered out here before the yellow liquid is carted over to the next station, electrolysis. They are used to extract the gold from both our king's water and cyanide solutions from the four. The negative terminal is on the left and the positive is on the right with a stirring motor in the middle. The terminals will collect other things, while the gold in a porous form called sponge gold collects in a titanium container. This process continues for 24 hours and the voltages applied to extract this purity of gold are apparently trade secrets that they wouldn't allow us to show. Once all the gold is extracted, the liquid gets transferred to another facility where they're focused on taking out silver. Leading us then finally to where the magic really happens, the casting room. Our sponge gold is heated to over a thousand degrees. The vapors you see being captured by the fume hood are small acid impurities. Then some regular household borax is added to act as a flux and purifying agent and the gold gets poured into a cast. Yes my friends, you are witnessing the birth of a gold brick. The cast gets poured into water to cool and harden it, then it's actually still pretty warm when it comes out. Our four to five nines fine grade two kilogram gold brick is ready for polishing and transfer to the vault. Which they unfortunately wouldn't let us inside. So I don't even know how much, what's two kilos of gold worth? See your smile. Take off the mask and say see your smile. So how much is this one worth? Maybe $2,040,000 NT dollars. Oh like a hundred thousand Canadian or so? Sorry. No, no not so much. So each month then the 130 people working at SRTI turn about 200 metric tons of what would otherwise be e-waste into a hundred kilograms of gold, 800 to 900 kilograms of silver and about a metric ton of copper. Unbelievable. A huge shout out to them for allowing us behind the scenes to see how they've built an amazing business out of reusing and recycling precious materials while minimizing the environmental impact of the electronics manufacturing taking place on their island home. You've probably heard, maybe even on this show, that browsing the internet with a VPN is safer and more secure. But if it looks complicated, never fear, TunnelBear has got you covered. TunnelBear is a simple download and then basically one button. 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