Life is sweet when you have a reliable source of income. Do you know that millions of tons of electronic waste are produced every year, translating to millions of tons of possible sources of gold? Researchers have come up with a new gold extraction method that is cheaper, faster and safer.
The extraction methods newly discovered is not only financially viable, but environment-friendly. The problem with gold is that it’s not a reactive chemical element. This makes it hard to dissolve, making extraction and recovery difficult.
Commonly, mining for gold calls for massive amount of sodium cyanide, which is bad for the environment. Gold can also be acquired by recycling electronic scraps, such as circuits and computer chips, but the process is costly and also hurts the environment.
The idea behind the research is as a result of the current practices which devastates the environment. The team finds the need to provide a solution combining acetic acid with small amounts of another acid and an oxidant. With it, gold extraction can be carried out under conditions mild enough so as not to hurt the environment, but still efficient enough that the element is dissolved in record time.
However, to extract a kilogram of gold from circuit boards, the typical method will require 5,000 litres of aqua regia, a nitric acid-hydrochloric acid mixture. With the new method, just 100 litres of the researchers’ solution will be needed.
It will interest you to know that stripping gold from circuits at about 10 seconds is the fastest rate ever recorded. The next step for the researchers is to work on integrating the solution into larger-scaled applications needed for recycling gold.
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