A new chemical has been found that will bind with gold, allowing it to be filtered from other scrap metals and materials.
Gold ore can be extracted from a solution by binding it to amides.
This new chemical is a primary amide used to form stable complexes, which allow the gold to be collected, with a reclamation percentage of over 80%. This sort of chemical will be used mainly to retrieve gold found in circuit boards, from items like phones or computers.
To perform this sort of task, they first melt the gold with a hydrochloric acid leaching solution, the introduced the gold to a aromatic hydrocarbon solvent. This dissolves the gold into a liquid solution.
After, they were able to bind the negatively charged gold chloride complex by introducing the positively charged amide ligand.
The actual chemical they discovered is never named, however. Likely for the purpose of keeping it for themselves, so they can sell it and make a nice profit.
Delicious gold.
This complex process allows the gold to be collected easily.
As someone who has run their own gold scrap business (not gold extraction, simply purchasing broken and unwanted gold jewellery for melting), I am very interested in finding the name of this non-toxic chemical. Hopefully, it is not kept a closely held secret in the same vein as Mcdonalds special sauce, or coca-colas secret recipe.
The amount of toxic chemicals finding its ways into our natural streams, rivers, oceans and animals is not sustainable, and I suspect, long term, the social costs of such toxicity finding itself into our waterways, will far outweigh one companies annual profit report. Here's to hoping they release the name of the chemical.
Kind regards,
Optimistic
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I agree.
I'd really like to know the name too. It likely will be released, but only after they've secured a patent.
Of course, that doesn't stop you from making it yourself, if you've got the chemistry knowledge.
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Paging @walterwhite - wow does that account really not exist? :P
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It kills me they don't give the name. I tried recreating it on ChemDoodle but it wants me to pay $20 to figure out the IUPAC name. Bullshit. I know the end is a group formed by bonding to Nitrous acid and the rest of it, I can't figure out. Bah. Sorry my knowledge is so limited. I do know that Aqua Regia is a combinatious of Nitric and Hydrochloric acids, so this concept is not too farfetched. If it means I can separate gold from Silicon, I'm all for it.
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Very interesting
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Damn corporations always keeping the good stuff for themselves. If us regular people had this we would be able to extract gold from old telephones and computers. Then we would not need to spend thousands of dollars on gold.
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There is so little gold in those, it still might not be worth it.
New wifi routers do have some silver in them, though ;)
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