Golden Ping!..........................
People who currently retrieve the gold from circuit boards are not interested in that gold doing anything with co2, they want the gold itself.
“chemical-free method”
“synthesized a set of organic materials known as covalent organic frameworks linked with vinyl”
The article quickly contradicts itself.
Beautifully written and ready for inclusion into 1) grant applications from the federal government and 2) the prospectus for luring venture capital to invest in Zadehnazar's BIL's newly formed LLC.
LOL…California do-gooders hoist on their own do-gooder petard. Figures.
I don’t see anything about the cost of this method.
If it cannot produce more value than it costs, it is useless.
There’s already a widespread simple way to turn carbon dioxide into safe organic material, plants.🌱 🌲🌳
The back yard smelters that the Chinese use to “refine” gold are far worse than anything I have ever seen. If this causes them to only produce half as much pollution as they currently do, it is a win-win for everyone.
https://youtu.be/-mj4Wd_rmvM?si=_n3tO_eJCGqvVjFS
Some reports tell us that an old-school PC contained an eye-watering $9 worth of gold. But that’s not counting the cost of removing it.
Some other sources estimate that your average computer contains about 1/5th of a gram, or about $12 worth, of gold in them. On the other hand, laptops typically contain about 1/10th of a gram of gold, or around $6 worth.
However, the actual value will depend entirely on the type of e-waste you are looking at. For example, industrial video equipment often has a proportionally higher amount of gold, sometimes above 56 grams per machine.
Need something like this for rare earths extraction
“Led by post-doctorate researcher Amin Zadehnazar”
Is this in Iran?
What is the net cost of this process?
And how much waste is still left? (99% I bet)
The gold that I see in the picture is on the connectors.
These connectors could be sawed off before further processing.
I tried once crushing the chips, then panning the residue for the gold.
It turned out to be a big waste of time and effort. Wasn’t worth it.
OK ... i skimmed the full paper looking for the catch ... amongst others, was this one:
“Metal flakes were removed from an end-of-life CPU board by mechanically scraping the components”
not very scalable for railroad cars of scrapped electronics, huh?
and then of course there was the complex and expensive chemical method used to put the mechanically scraped gold in aqueous solution ...
and of course there was the complex and expensive chemical method to make the capturing matrix in the first place ...
and finally, looks like it takes ANOTHER complex and expensive chemical process to release the gold ions from the complex and expensive matrix ...
the whole thing had to be much more costly than mining new gold in the first place ...
and according to AI google, there’s many simpler [and presumably economic] methods of gold recovery:
There are several ways to recover gold from scrap electronics, including:
Acid treatment
Mix hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide in a glass vessel, submerge the circuit boards, and stir daily for a week. The acid will darken and gold flakes will form.
Acetic acid and oxidant
This nontoxic solution dissolves gold from circuits in about 10 seconds, leaving other metals intact.
Protein fibril sponge
Researchers at ETH Zurich created a sponge from whey proteins to recover gold ions from e-waste. The sponge is placed in a metal ion solution to extract the gold.
Cupellation
This process treats ores or alloyed metals at high temperatures to separate precious metals from base metals. The precious metals remain apart while the base metals react and form slags or other compounds.
Other methods for recovering gold from scrap electronics include:
Using a mixture of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid
Using other mild acids
Burning off the gold at high temperatures
Leaching chemicals like a cyanide solution
Smashing the motherboard into bits and dissolving it in an aqua regia bath
The value of the recovered gold depends on its purity and the current market price of gold. A skilled recycler can expect to receive over $10,000 worth of gold from just one ton of computer circuit boards.
His grant writers certainly used every “green” buzzword to beg for tax dollars.