Green mining - new method of extracting gold discovered

Repost from Clean Tecnica | May 15, 2013

Many communities are protesting and are up in arms vs gold mining because of cyanide contaminated tailings.  There seems to be only one way of extracting gold from ore via cyanide  and is highly toxic and the yield is miniscule.  The maximum yield from cyanide gold extraction  is  max 7 grams.  There are other methods:   gold panning (only in gold rich areas as in Alaska and California)


Gold fracking increases yield about 5 fold

However there is new method discovered to extract gold from ore and even from electronic waste (there is lot of gold in electronic junk - cp and pc). without degrading the environment.  The new process was discovered by a research assistant Zichang Lu, a doctoral fellow at Sir Fraser Stoddart at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.  It uses starch in liue of the toxic reagent - cyanide.

Zichang mixed a starch derived substance  - alpha cyclodextrin with gold salt in an experiment to find out how to store gases and molecules.

Alpha cyclodextrin isolated gold best of all, and did not leave any toxic residue