Quote Originally Posted by mthomasdev View Post
I believe a chemical process is still required at some point. My understanding is that pins and fingers are gold plated. The gold would need to be dissolved off of the base metal to be recovered.
I would agree. That would be especially so with processors, ram and gold plated connectors.

Printed circuit boards are a different situation. I was watching the "How It works" documentary and the information seemed awfully dated. They had all of these vintage computers, were tossing ribbon cable in the trash, and burning the boards in a furnace. It was posted to youtube in 2014 and the best info i could get from the IMDB was that it was probably filmed sometime around 2004.



There have been a lot of advancements in PCB recycling technology since then.

Slightly off topic, but check out this youtube chemical horror show from India. It gets particularly interesting about 3.15 minutes in. ( Posted to youtube on 10/28/2011 )