Picasso‘s favourite pigment might sooner or later recycle metals out of your mobile phone

A new method helps recover gold from E-waste at a higher rate than it can be extracted from fresh ore.

Enlarge / A brand new technique helps recuperate gold from E-waste at a better fee than it may be extracted from contemporary ore. (credit score: Reiko Matsushita/Shinta Watanabe)

Gold and sure different valuable metals are key components in laptop chips, together with these utilized in client electronics resembling good telephones. However it may be tough to recuperate and recycle these metals from digital waste. Japanese researchers have discovered {that a} pigment extensively utilized by artists known as Prussian blue can extract gold and platinum-group metals from e-waste rather more effectively than standard bio-based absorbents, in accordance with a latest paper revealed within the journal Scientific Reviews.

“The quantity of gold contained in a single ton of cell phones is 300-400 grams, which is far greater by 10-80 occasions than that in a single ton of pure ore,” the authors wrote. “The opposite parts have an analogous scenario. Consequently, the restoration of these valuable parts from e-wastes is rather more efficient and environment friendly when in comparison with their collections from pure ore.”

Prussian blue is the primary fashionable artificial pigment. Granted, there was as soon as a pigment generally known as Egyptian blue utilized in historical Egypt for millennia; the Romans known as it caeruleum. However after the Roman empire collapsed, the pigment wasn’t used a lot, and finally the key to the way it was made was misplaced. (Scientists have since discovered easy methods to recreate the method.) So earlier than Prussian blue was found, painters had to make use of indigo dye, smalt, or the expensive ultramarine created from lapis lazuli for deep blue hues.

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