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Old 8th Mar 2018, 3:10 pm   #13
Al (astral highway)
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Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: London, UK.
Posts: 3,496
Default Re: Availability of Leaded Solder?

Quote:
Originally Posted by MrBungle View Post
T. The issue is however with the production, disposal and recycling. Historically stuff, including discarded electronics, were buried in landfill as part of general waste and made it into the water table eventually.
Hello, I worked for a giant copper and lead smelting group for around five years and it had a colossal metal recovery operation, globally, across the UK, Europe, and the United States. The US operation alone was about half of the USA's entire copper production from secondary (scrap) metal.

It was then something of a leader in 'recycling', although I was later to learn that the term can be anything but green. Here is the article I seeded and wrote on Wikipedia, after I had researched the company's activities after it had been fined by the EPA. (It is still an ongoing research project of mine: I'm at 35,000 words. I've been following the story for ten years and until the clean-up of a contaminated site is complete, will continue to do so.)

Both the Belgian and US smelters produced lead ingots as well as 99.9 per cent pure copper. They amassed copper scrap from wholesale scrap merchants and did so in quantities of tens of thousands of tonnes per month: all kinds of grades, from industrial by-products produced by brass and bronze foundries, to electrical cable, to domestic heating pipes. There were over 20 commonly traded categories and probably twice as many specialist alloys encountered less commonly.

A lot of the lead came from alloys of copper and bronzes, in particular, but until the late 80s they were certainly buying car batteries in huge quantities.

They also bought computer scrap and circuit boards to recover lead, as well as gold and silver, which they then passed on to specialists.

A great deal of lead went straight up the chimney: a US EPA enforcement manager said that this single plant was, for many years, the biggest producer of atmospheric lead in the entire United States.

Run-off and deliberate flushing of heavy-metal bearing waste is another whole giant story - the one that I'm working on.
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