Precious metal recovery is an industry (random Google hit:https://princeizant.com/precious-metal-recovery). I'd recommend selling the scrap. There are a wide variety of companies that recover gold, Pt, Ir, etc. from scrap, most commonly from electronics and spent catalysts. There's gold in them thar' PC boards, so naturally, there are gold miners too. A lot of copper as well, incidentally.

I'd consider that a better choice than a DIY approach; no waste that you're responsible for, and you don't have to deal with what is essentially weak Piranha solution, which isn't something suitable for undergraduates to work with. If there's somebody nearby who does that industrially, perhaps you could wangle a plant tour for the educational benefit.

Regards,

Dan

-------------------------------------------------

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On Jan 31, 2022, at 12:44, Melissa Anderson <mwanderson08**At_Symbol_Here**GMAIL.COM> wrote:

Hi All,

Just got the question below from a student and wanted to get some additional opinions on the best way to respond. My initial take is

1) This is unlikely to be profitable and would be difficult to execute on a larger scale. They're probably better off recycling the materials.

2) I'm not a big fan of generating hazardous waste just for the novelty of seeing if you can perform a cool reaction. I'm inclined to recommend against even suggesting they do this (supervised) at a small scale for the "educational" benefit. (For reference, this is an introductory chem student, not an upper-division student.)

Here's the question text:

"I work for a small business that sells precision measurement equipment. We recently purchased a portion of another company, and as part of that buyout we received literally tens of thousands of old obsolete computer parts and microchips and the like. They're not really worth anything now (except for being really cool, old electronics), so we're not really having much luck trying to resell them. Here's where the potentially fun part comes in.

A good portion of these parts are coated in gold. I've done a bit of research online, and it looks like there's a process to chemically separate the gold from the rest of the components. The internet is, as usual, a bit contradictory on what process is the best way to go about it. Different sites profess their way is best, and I'm obviously green when it comes to chemistry, so I was wondering what your thoughts were?

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/extract-gold-from-electronics

Here's an article I found after a brief google search kind of outlining a process. I was hoping to give this a shot on a small scale and then maybe attempt something larger if I'm successful. But I need to know... Will following this article get me killed or result in a visit from the FBI??? I think it would be a fun, cool way to do a bit of chemistry and make the business I work for a bit of extra money off of some items that would otherwise just be thrown away, but I obviously want to do it in a safe, proper way

Any advice or insight you have would be greatly appreciated"

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