How to Recover Silver from Electrical Silver Contacts?/Silver Recovery/Silver Recovery Business/How to Separate Silver from Copper

Silver contacts are either made of pure silver and soldered on copper strips, or copper contacts are coated with a thick layer of silver. In both conditions, silver can be recovered with nitric acid (HNO3).

If the silver contacts are soldered on copper strips, you can cut the copper strips with a cutter to separate the silver contacts from them. Now place all of the silver contact points in a stainless steel pot. Take one part nitric acid (68%), one part water, and mix them together. Now pour this small amount of dilute nitric acid onto the silver points in the stainless steel pot. The copper and silver will react with nitric acid and start dissolving into it. This reaction produces some smoke. So, either you should do it in the open or in a room with an exhaust fan, so that the exhaust fan should send all the smoke out into the air. Keep pouring dilute nitric acid into the pot till all the metals dissolve into the solution. Now there are two metals in the solution in the form of nitrates, that is, silver nitrate and copper nitrate. First, we will recover silver from this solution. To do that, take HCL (hydrochloric acid) at 35% purity. Mix HCL with silver nitrate solution in small increments. When silver chloride stops separating from the solution, stop adding HCL. Decant the solution when silver chloride (AgCl) has settled completely to the bottom.

 Heat up some water and add it to the silver chloride. You can use a plastic pot to do so. Take round iron pieces of around two inches in diameter and half an inch thickness. Put these iron rings onto silver chloride in a plastic container. With a wooden rod, slowly move around these iron rings for a while. Silver chloride will start changing colour and converting into pure silver. Once there is no more silver chloride in the container, stop stirring the rings. Now you have pure silver dust. Take out the rings; wash the silver dust with plain water three times. Dry this dust and melt it into a solid piece of silver.

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