I've mentioned more than once how the thought of mounting e-waste keeps me up at night. Adding to the anxious no-slumber party is the fact that, to extract the gold necessary for the manufacture of a whole bunch of PC hardware, typical mining practices often use environmentally damaging amounts of cyanide and mercury. However, a recent research paper from a team at Flinders University in Australia takes aim at both anxious thoughts, offering some compelling bedtime reading.
In an article published in Nature, the research team detailed a new method for extracting gold from existing e-waste (via Techxplore). Better yet, this process is relatively low-cost and largely avoids the use of toxic chemicals. Instead, the team's process relies on a reagent widely used in water sanitation to dissolve gold in not just e-waste, but mixed metal waste, and gold ore as well.
