Value of Tin

[nwinther]

I was reading a news article about windmills, and the author mentions "industrial metals" as a scarcity. I've never come across that term before and decided to look it up. Turns out it's Copper, Zinc, Aluminium and Tin.

Incidentally, I came across the price of these metals on Bloomberg, and I was surprised to see, that Tin is 4-5 times more valuable than copper, with ~42 USD/kg. Copper just under 10UDS/kg.

I know that besides AU, AG and PGM's, there's vaulable metals, such as indium, that can be found in electronics. But I've alwasy imagines tin being much more base than, say, copper. Now it turns out it's the other way round.

People here sometimes talk about refining copper, for various reasons. But why not tin? Seems to be worth a lot more.
You guys know about any other metals that we come across regularly, that has a (surprisingly) higher value than, say Tin?

 

[Swissgoldrefiner]

Probably the amount of Tin that you can recover from wast is not that much. I mostly buy around 2Mt of Tin every month which is in form of vessels at 85% or 95%.
It can worth for me to refine it, but it s maybe too much work and the premium is not that high...except ifi can sell it to some company who use it. Copper i dont refine it, but i think mostly when people are talking about refining copper is to left behind PM.

 

[nickvc]

In e scrap there can be many rare metals or compounds depending on its use , for the home refiner there is no efficient or profitable way to reclaim them I’m afraid.

 

[justinhcase]

In e scrap there can be many rare metals or compounds depending on its use , for the home refiner there is no efficient or profitable way to reclaim them I’m afraid.

Well, a proper waste treatment system should capture all base metal's less reactive than iron.
But it will be very mixed.
I still have every last gram of such metal that has come into my system.
It is mostly copper with a high level of nickel and just about every other metallic element used in industry after that.
But it would require a very large furnace to melt into an alloy. And then only be of interest to a copper refinery.
It takes quite a lot of such alloy before such large refinery will even talk to you.

 

[nickvc]

Well, a proper waste treatment system should capture all base metal's less reactive than iron.
But it will be very mixed.
I still have every last gram of such metal that has come into my system.
It is mostly copper with a high level of nickel and just about every other metallic element used in industry after that.
But it would require a very large furnace to melt into an alloy. And then only be of interest to a copper refinery.
It takes quite a lot of such alloy before such large refinery will even talk to you.

The kicker is that certain metals and or elements carry penalty charges with the big copper refiners as they foul the electrolyte very quickly.

 

[nwinther]

Probably the amount of Tin that you can recover from wast is not that much. I mostly buy around 2Mt of Tin every month which is in form of vessels at 85% or 95%.

Not sure what you mean with Mt - Megatons?
But this is somewhat what I was thinking about. Pewter items had their day and - where I come from - much less sought after than, say, copper, as decorative items (some copper items are used in cooking too).
But Tin and pewter are in low demand and rather high supply in thrift-stores and probably lots of other places.
When I see a guy like Ewaste/-scrapper Ben (or whatever his name is), he frequently mentions copper, but I don't recall him mentioning Tin. Scrapping tin would be worth more, it seems.
Same with that guy "bigstacked" who tears down motors and stuff and melts down the copper/aluinium (his economy is in views, not metals, I know) and present it as "treasure". Would make a whole lot more sense to melt down tin/pewter (lot less energy-intensive as well).

 

[orvi]

Not sure what you mean with Mt - Megatons?
But this is somewhat what I was thinking about. Pewter items had their day and - where I come from - much less sought after than, say, copper, as decorative items (some copper items are used in cooking too).
But Tin and pewter are in low demand and rather high supply in thrift-stores and probably lots of other places.
When I see a guy like Ewaste/-scrapper Ben (or whatever his name is), he frequently mentions copper, but I don't recall him mentioning Tin. Scrapping tin would be worth more, it seems.
Same with that guy "bigstacked" who tears down motors and stuff and melts down the copper/aluinium (his economy is in views, not metals, I know) and present it as "treasure". Would make a whole lot more sense to melt down tin/pewter (lot less energy-intensive as well).

I think he meant metric tons. But maybe megatons we will see

Part of the answer is that tin is much harder to sell conveniently, than copper. Where I live, nobody will buy tin in the scrapyards etc. You need to seek for bigger guys, and there could be problem with minimum quantity required and low payout.

Yeah, YouTube could be strange evidently, they make money out of the content, so... Nothing to say, other than personal opinion, which does not matter here

 

[kurtak]

Part of the answer is that tin is much harder to sell conveniently, than copper. Where I live, nobody will buy tin in the scrapyards etc. You need to seek for bigger guys, and there could be problem with minimum quantity required and low payout.

Correct - find a buyer for tin is much more difficult then finding a buyer for other metals (like copper etc.)

With tin you basically have two options - the BIG BOYS in which case you need LOTS of it before they will even talk to you - or - hobby/craft people such as someone that does casting (like bronze cast &/or pewter casting) or stained glass work or etc. etc.

For what it's worth - I used to recover the tin from HCl used to dissolve solder (on CBs) by cementing it with zinc which I then sold to a friend that did some bronze/brass casting

I had to smelt the tin cement with a reducing flux (carbon in the flux) because the tin cement tends to oxidize when drying it

Kurt

 

[Swissgoldrefiner]

I think he meant metric tons. But maybe megatons we will see

Part of the answer is that tin is much harder to sell conveniently, than copper. Where I live, nobody will buy tin in the scrapyards etc. You need to seek for bigger guys, and there could be problem with minimum quantity required and low payout.

Yeah, YouTube could be strange evidently, they make money out of the content, so... Nothing to say, other than personal opinion, which does not matter here

It's Metric tons...1000 kilo

 

[justinhcase]

The kicker is that certain metals and or elements carry penalty charges with the big copper refiners as they foul the electrolyte very quickly.

Yes, a complicated subject.
From my understanding, there is a great art in mixing their anodes.
They have a lot of pure copper from scrap, but need a certain amount of impurities to run efficiently.
So they need a mixed alloy to introduce to the clean copper scrap, and the value of such alloy will be down to availability and how much stockpile they happen to have.
Then you are coming to how harmonised your alloy is and if you have enough to be paid by assay.
It is the same story, people down stream will always be undervalued and until you are providing tens of tonnes a week you will be uneconomical for them to deal with.
I am just hoping the high market value of things such as nickel will eventually reward stockpiling waste for going on a decade.
It may be one of those little piggy bank retirement funds in another decade.
But we keep it or sell it.

 

[GREENER]

Hi all,

Tin, (pure tin, that is) is being used nowadays by the current, and the next generation of EUV chipmanufacturing machines produced by ASML
from the Netherlands.
Shooting a high power laserbeam twice on a single droplet of tin to produce a bath of plasma inside a chamber containing pure water and the silicon dye, on which the chip is being ``built``, layer on layer, using a nano-scale mesh.

Currently, ASML is hard-pressed in assembling enough machines to satisfy demand.

As for industrial metals, I`d like to add; stainless and normal iron offcourse.

Tin, copper, nickel, aluminum, stainless steel and some other metals wil rise in value in the coming few years.

The current main EUV model (NXE), weighs in at 18.000 kilo`s, 5 meters long, 2,6 meters wide, and some 3 meters high.

The next model; (EXE), will weigh in at an assembled end weight of 110.000 kilo`s, of mostly aluminum and followed closely by stainless.
This model will also use tin for its plasma bath, and it has a higher/larger rate of production on an even smaller nano-scale mesh.

I, uptil recently, used to install the highly specialised floors on which these machines are assembled.

In summary;
Wait a bit, and many of the metals which we reclaim from the e-waste hobby will bring more revenue.

Apart from the aluminum in the EUV machines, the chip producing factories, (building and building infrastucture),
are laden with aluminum, stainless and copper.

As for Tin, I will try and find the video of GEO, in which there is talk about an easy way of recovering tin from HCL, it`s in the comment section of one of his more recent video`s on you-tube.

Chris.

 

[GREENER]

Found the video made by Geo,

This is something that I will be trying to implement for tin recovery, hope it really works.



Geo is answering questions towards; Thankgod Sylvester Omoigui, it`s in the piece; ``View 12 replies from Geo and others.``

It is in the video;

gold bonding wires from IC packages, 9 december 2012.​

​