Бизнес и финансы

Scientists invent method to extract gold from liquid waste

Author: Matthew Davis / Source: Big Think

Even though we think of it as exceedingly rare, gold can be found all around us.
The trouble is, most of the gold is hard to get at; its too diluted in our waste or ocean waters to effectively extract.
This new technique quickly, easily, and reliably extracts gold from most liquids.

Even though the thought of gold calls to mind incredible wealth hidden underground or horded away in Fort Knox, you can actually find the stuff all over the place. there’s gold in nearly every kind of consumer electronic, gold in our sewage, gold in the cracks of New York City sidewalks, and even trace amounts in our brains. The trouble isn’t that gold is rare, per se, it’s just hard to get to.

In human history, we’ve mined about 190,000 tons of gold out of the ground. If you want to visualize that amount, it would fit in a box about 20 m on each side; not all that much in the grand scheme of things. We’ve been able to get at this because it was stored in a way that’s relatively easy for us to access. It was buried in the Earth, so we just had to dig it up. In contrast, we’ve estimated that there’s about 20 million tons of gold in the ocean—it’s just distributed throughout the seas, making it difficult to refine and extract.

In the past, we didn’t use gold for much of anything besides as a method to store value, so the fact that most gold on Earth was inaccessible was more of a feature than a bug. But now, we’re increasingly finding practical applications for the precious metal. It can be used in medicine to treat arthritis or for dentistry; it’s an excellent conductor, so it can be used in electronics and communication technology; and it reflects infrared radiation, so we use it on our spacecraft and spacesuits. Suddenly, getting at those 20 million tons of gold in the ocean and elsewhere on Earth has become more about technological and societal progress than about accumulating wealth.

New research from the Journal of the American Chemical Society has uncovered one of the most effective methods to date to extract gold from liquids. That includes electronic waste, sewage, ocean water, waste water—almost any liquid where we might find gold. Just to highlight how potentially useful this is, sewage from Switzerland alone is estimated to carry away 1.

8 million dollars’ worth of gold every year.