Application of a new method for recovery of gold from electronic waste

Annually, around 50 million tonnes of electronic wastes is produced worldwide which contains valuable metals such as gold, copper, silver and palladium. Due to the lack of a suitable recycling technology, more than 80% of these wastes end up in landfills. The economic driving force for e-waste recycling has been recovery of precious metals, especially gold, in which more than 80% of the total value is attributed to gold alone. The current industrial processes for recovery of precious metals from electronic scraps are energy intensive, expensive, time consuming, and non-efficient. Finding a suitable recycling method to extract the maximum amount of valuable metals from e-wastes is a major challenge facing the electronic waste recycling industry today. Recently, we have developed a process using acetic acid that recovers gold selectively from gold plated electronic scraps like printed circuit boards (PCBs) with very high efficiencies. TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Stephen Foley

Student:

Loghman Moradi

Partner:

Jazoo Express Courier Ltd

Discipline:

Chemistry

Sector:

Alternative energy

University:

Program: