# New way to recover gold



## Zolotov (Mar 4, 2017)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3766694/The-simple-method-remove-GOLD-phone-New-technique-recover-300-tonnes-metal-year.html



> The method involves placing the circuit boards into mild acid to dissolve all the metal parts.
> An oily liquid which contains a chemical compound is then added, which only extracts the gold.



Any idea of what this *oily liquid* could be?
Or is this some (chemically) useless pageviewmaking content ?


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## Geo (Mar 4, 2017)

The process is called "solvent extraction of gold". It works on solutions that contain gold(III) chloride. DGB or Diethylene glycol butyl. It will absorb the gold chloride when mixed together and then the spent solution will settle out and the gold pregnant DGB will float to the top like oil. It is separated in a separatory funnel and the gold is dropped from the DGB.


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## Zolotov (Mar 4, 2017)

Geo said:


> The process is called "solvent extraction of gold".


Thanks!
BTW, I found another new method, by using mushrooms:

http://gizmodo.com/mushrooms-can-mine-the-gold-from-your-old-cellphones-1563185046



> The first step is crushing the old phones into a fine powder. That powder is sieved and passed through the mycelium, which was chemically engineered to attract gold. The researchers say this process recovers 80 percent of the gold, compared to just 10 or 20 percent in the common but toxic chemical processes



maybe someone here tried it?


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## Geo (Mar 4, 2017)

I wouldn't bet on it. While the solvent extraction is actually a refining process, using mushrooms seems a little too much for much too little.


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## patnor1011 (Mar 4, 2017)

If I would recover just 10-20% with "common toxic chemical process" that mean I do something wrong. Not something, probably everything.


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## g_axelsson (Mar 4, 2017)

Zolotov said:


> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3766694/The-simple-method-remove-GOLD-phone-New-technique-recover-300-tonnes-metal-year.html
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Yet another example of a researcher that doesn't know how the recycling business works...


> Professor Jason Love, who led the study, told MailOnline: 'Current gold extraction processes use toxic chemicals such as cyanide or mercury which have high toxicity, plus the waste materials remaining after gold recovery often contain toxic metals such as lead.'


Cyanide is used in mining or in special cases on gold plated scrap and is a lot more environmental friendly than "dissolving circuit boards in acid". Mercury is only used in mining in undeveloped countries where people doesn't know better. Mercury is not used in the modern world mining and especially not for recovery of gold in electronic waste.

It can be the reporter that hasn't understood the researcher though.

There are several liquids that can be used today for LLX (Liquid Liquid eXtraction), one of the most known is butyldiglyme, BDG. Another one is Diethyl malonate.
http://goldrefiningwiki.com/mediawiki/index.php/BDG
http://goldrefiningwiki.com/mediawiki/index.php/DEM

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=24076&p=254688#p254688

Göran


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## g_axelsson (Mar 4, 2017)

Second article seems like someone have been smoking mushrooms...

How would you practically pass finely crushed cell phones through mycelium? And isn't copper a good fungicide?

I think I'll stick to tested and working methods for my refining.

Googling the source a bit... turns out that the gold has to be in solution, who could have known it was so complicated. :lol: 
http://www.vttresearch.com/media/news/filter-developed-by-vtt-helps-recover-80-of-gold-in-mobile-phone-scrap
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0892687515000308
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aic.14917/full

It's never as easy as the clickbait article tries to show.

Göran


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## 4metals (Mar 4, 2017)

Articles like the first one linked are about as close to fake news as it gets. It is more about writing an article to get sponsors and sell ad space than about refining. All it takes is a little knowledge of refining and a blind eye to all that can go wrong and you can write a pretty good sounding article. Add in a picture of a pile of gold bars and you'll convince all the doubters!

If it wasn't such a sad misrepresentation it could be funny!


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## Iggy-poo (Mar 4, 2017)

Zolotov said:


> Geo said:
> 
> 
> > The process is called "solvent extraction of gold".
> ...


People near Chernobyl use Mushrooms as path lights, since they also attract radioactive elements.


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## g_axelsson (Mar 5, 2017)

Iggy-poo said:


> People near Chernobyl use Mushrooms as path lights, since they also attract radioactive elements.


I would call bogus on that statement.

Göran


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## Iggy-poo (Mar 5, 2017)

g_axelsson said:


> Iggy-poo said:
> 
> 
> > People near Chernobyl use Mushrooms as path lights, since they also attract radioactive elements.
> ...



I was just trying to be funny. Mushrooms are non-selective, in that they attract other Elements besides Gold, some of which we don't want.

Does that explain the humor better? I know, English is not your first language, but you need to repress the Viking Genes a bit.


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## FrugalRefiner (Mar 5, 2017)

English is my first language, and I didn't understand your humor either.

Dave


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## Iggy-poo (Mar 5, 2017)

FrugalRefiner said:


> English is my first language, and I didn't understand your humor either.
> 
> Dave



Perhaps I should leave another crumb:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20002056


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## Geo (Mar 5, 2017)

Iggy-poo said:


> FrugalRefiner said:
> 
> 
> > English is my first language, and I didn't understand your humor either.
> ...



Are you really here to learn? Baiting the mods will not earn you any favors and will eventually get you banned.


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## g_axelsson (Mar 5, 2017)

Since the vikings were very scientific minded I have a hard time to see the humor in that post. :wink: 

We do get new members now and then that is stupid enough to actually believe in such a story. Sometimes we also get members that use dry humor when discussing serious topics and if a stupid member sees it might try out a dangerous procedure.

Maybe that's why my humor isn't so well developed when I'm on this site.

I actually googled the glowing mushrooms, expecting to find a clickbait site with fake news but what I found was a reference to a computer game that had glowing mushrooms feeding of radiation and was located at Chernobyl. 8) 

Several years after that accident we avoided to pick mushrooms since where I live was one of the places hit by the radioactive cloud. Not that hard hit, but the background radiation went up to the same levels as in late 60:es when USA and Soviet stopped the atmospheric nuclear testing.

Göran


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## geedigity (Mar 5, 2017)

Actually, there are at least three mushrooms that I know that glow in the dark or luminescence. The Jack-O-Lantern, Pannelus stipticus and sometimes Gymnophilia spectabilis or Big Laughing Gym. However, the glow is not due to radioactivity.


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## Iggy-poo (Mar 6, 2017)

Fungi use radiation as a food source:



https://unitedcats.wordpress.com/2007/05/29/major-biological-discoveryinside-the-chernobyl-reactor/


The real reason for not using Mushrooms is that radioactive elements are not a good thing to have in material sent to a Refinery:

http://www.jmrefining.com/files/files/Johnson-Matthey-Standard-Refining-Terms-Conditions-North-America.pdf

Look under deterious materials.


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## glorycloud (Mar 6, 2017)

I know that I don't have a vote but if I had a vote,
I would vote "iggy-poo" off the island. :roll:


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## rickbb (Mar 6, 2017)

I want to know how they "chemically engineer" a mushroom. I've heard of cross breeding plants and splicing DNA, but chemically making a new plant. hmmmm, the BS meter is starting to alarm.


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## Zolotov (Mar 7, 2017)

rickbb said:


> the BS meter is starting to alarm.


Not a BS at all. The first artificial cell was created 7 years ago, that was like "discovering America" event in scientific community:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703559004575256470152341984
Genetic engineering is going to be the next big thing, bigger than software today.

p.s.
they meant "genetically" of course, not chemically, editor's typo


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## g_axelsson (Mar 7, 2017)

This thread has derailed a bit... okay, there seems to exist some fungus that might be able to use radiation as an energy source (I'm not totally convicted on that yet), there are some organisms that can emit light (called bioluminescence), some mushrooms concentrate some radioactive elements like cesium but it has nothing to do with the radioactivity.

If we would process radioactive waste then there might be a concentration of radioactive elements with the precious metals, but so far I haven't heard of anyone on the forum doing that.
I can't see any increased dangers of radioactivity by using mushroom derivative when recovering gold in any way.

What the synthetic cell has to do with anything I haven't manage to find out yet.

Mushrooms, just as any other organism on this planet uses the same type of DNA so if we can manipulate a plant or animal, fungus is basically the same. In early days one of the favorite organisms used was yeast cells.

Okay, time to go back on track. Gold refining.

Göran


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## anachronism (Mar 7, 2017)

g_axelsson said:


> S
> I actually googled the glowing mushrooms, expecting to find a clickbait site with fake news but what I found was a reference to a computer game that had glowing mushrooms feeding of radiation and was located at Chernobyl. 8)
> 
> Göran



You would be referring to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series of games Goran - they were a milestone in PC gaming and incredibly good to play. As you say they were set around Chernobyl.  

Being one of those dry people you mentioned in your post I have to admit that I did actually get what he meant by the humour


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## g_axelsson (Mar 7, 2017)

anachronism said:


> Being one of those dry people you mentioned in your post I have to admit that I did actually get what he meant by the humour


That's because you are British... my condolences... :mrgreen:

Göran


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## anachronism (Mar 7, 2017)

g_axelsson said:


> anachronism said:
> 
> 
> > Being one of those dry people you mentioned in your post I have to admit that I did actually get what he meant by the humour
> ...



Harsh Goran harsh.

I feel abused and violated and you should resign your moderator's position immediately for racism.

Maybe not


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## Ravn (Mar 8, 2017)

Hello 



Zolotov said:


> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... -year.html




Have a look at the interesting original scientific paper. 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201606113/abstract 

"A Simple Primary Amide for the Selective Recovery of Gold from Secondary Resources"


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## rickbb (Mar 9, 2017)

I'm no chemist but I can tell when someone it just throwing in technical sounding words to pad the work.

"Phase transfer occurs by dynamic assembly of protonated and neutral amides with [AuCl4]− ions through hydrogen bonding in the organic phase, as shown by EXAFS, mass spectrometry measurements, and computational calculations, and supported by distribution coefficient analysis. The fundamental chemical understanding gained herein should be integral to the development of metal-recovery processes, in particular through the use of dynamic assembly processes to build complexity from simplicity."

The only part of that that even remotely rings true to me is the part about making something complex from something simple.


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## Ravn (Mar 9, 2017)

Hi



rickbb said:


> I can tell when someone it just throwing in technical sounding words to pad the work.



If that was the case, the paper would never have been published in one of the absolute top scientific Journals.


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## g_axelsson (Mar 9, 2017)

rickbb said:


> I'm no chemist but I can tell when someone it just throwing in technical sounding words to pad the work.
> 
> "Phase transfer occurs by dynamic assembly of protonated and neutral amides with [AuCl4]− ions through hydrogen bonding in the organic phase, as shown by EXAFS, mass spectrometry measurements, and computational calculations, and supported by distribution coefficient analysis. The fundamental chemical understanding gained herein should be integral to the development of metal-recovery processes, in particular through the use of dynamic assembly processes to build complexity from simplicity."
> 
> The only part of that that even remotely rings true to me is the part about making something complex from something simple.


That's funny, the only part I think was added just to pad the work was "in particular through the use of dynamic assembly processes to build complexity from simplicity"

The rest tells us how gold chloride ions moves from one phase to the other, which molecules that is responsible for the transfer and how it is bonded in the organic phase. Then how it was tested and what the application could be.

It is obvious a liquid-liquid extraction between an aquatic phase and an organic phase so the gold has to be dissolved already as gold chloride. I have read the article but filed it under theoretical work aimed at creating a deeper understanding of the LLX-process and nothing I might use for gold refining.

After reading the article it seems like the "build complexity from simplicity" refers to the complex in the organic phase could create quite big "molecular clumps" or almost polymers, but I might have misunderstood that part.

Göran


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## rickbb (Mar 10, 2017)

Like I said, I'm no chemist, but it all sounded like making something from nothing to me.

:?


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