Abstract
Garlic peel (GP) was chemically modified by using thiourea under hydrothermal treatment, which could selectively adsorb gold ions from the 1/10 dilute aqua regia media directly without needing the dangerous evaporation operation. The synthetic chloroauric solution and practical leach liquor of the waste PCB (printed circuit board) powder in dilute aqua regia were employed to assess the adsorption performance on the thiol-GP and the commercial quaternary ammonia anion resin of D201, respectively. It was experimentally confirmed that the adsorption efficiency of gold onto the thiol-GP and D201 resin both reached 100%, and the maximum adsorption capacity of thiol-GP gel was evaluated as 42.59 mg Au/g that was much larger than that of D201 resin (3.33 mg Au/g). The thiol-GP gel adsorption efficiency of other coexisting base metal ions like Cu2+, Ni2+, Al3+, and Fe3+ from dilute aqua regia leach liquor of the waste PCB powder was near zero, and only gold could be enriched by selective adsorption onto the thiol-GP gel. At least 3 cycles of adsorption/elution could be obtained without decreasing the adsorption efficiency drastically. The adsorbed gold on the thiol-GP was able to be eluted effectively by using the mixture solution of 0.1 M thiourea and 0.1 M hydrochloric acid, and finally the solid gold could be recovered by sodium borohydride through a reduction process. This study demonstrated a green, environmentally friendly, low-cost, and efficient method for selective recovery of gold from the dilute leach liquor (aqua regia) of waste circuit boards.
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Funding
The present work was financially supported by the special fundamental funds by National Key Research and Development Plan Key special Projects for the key technology and engineering demonstration for multi-component deep separation and extraction of sulfur-based nickel and cobalt slag (Grant No. 2019YFC1907403).
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ZJJ conducted material testing, experimentation, and data processing and wrote the manuscript. HK provided ideas and wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Highlights
• A facile synthesis method was proposed to prepare the thiol-garlic peel gel.
• Thiol-GP gel could selectively recover gold from dilute aqua regia (1.3 mol/L) directly without needing to evaporate nitric acid.
• Thiol-modified GP gel had much larger gold adsorption capacity than that of commercial quaternary ammonium resin of D201 in the dilute aqua regia.
• Thiol-GP gel could be reused at least 3 cycles of adsorption/elution of gold.
• Gold particles were produced from eluted solution by reduction of sodium borohydride.
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Zhu, J., Huang, K. Selective recovery of gold from dilute aqua regia leachate of waste printed circuit board by thiol-modified garlic peel. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 55990–56003 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-19584-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-19584-2