Now, a mineral processing company called Mineworx claims to have found a safer option to recover such precious commodities from scrap, involving faster, efficient and more cost-effective methods.
The recovering activity – which generally takes four hours with cyanide – can now be accomplished in under an hour with the Company’s new HM X-leach formula, which is made of food-grade, organic ingredients and is recyclable.
The HM X-leach formula is used in a variety of extraction methods from carbon absorption and precipitation to electrowinning, which is also known as electroextraction. The process actually performs leaching (refining metal from a liquid solution) and large-scale electroplating to deposit the pure metal being extracted from the leaching solution to a cathode.
The formula has the potential to expand at a global scale, as cyanide has been banned in many countries.
Similar to the above mentioned breakthrough, UK-based Veolia has also found a way to recycle non-negligible amounts of platinum and palladium that breaks off from car exhausts in small particles.
