New polymer easily captures gold extracted from e-waste
Found on Ars technica on Sunday, 28 June 2020
The researchers’ gold-scrubber is based on an organic compound called a porphyrin. Linked together in a polymer, it possesses lots and lots of little pores that, energetically, want to host a metal atom.
The researchers say the polymer costs about $5 per gram to produce, and that gram can capture $64 in gold. And since the polymer can be reused, it would be considerably cheaper than that over time, adding little to the overall cost of a recycling operation.
That will make it a lot easier to retrieve gold, assuming that the polymer itself is harmless and safe.