Gold recovery from electronic wastes using a solvent extraction/selective back-extraction strategy

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present lab-scale investigation describes a simple and efficient approach to the selective solvent extraction and recovery of gold, and copper as a by-product, from Waste Printed Circuit Boards (WPCBs) of different brands of used computers. The process comprised of three steps; leaching of scraps in aqua regia, solvent extraction process under optimized conditions, and ultimately selective back-extraction. The analysis of leach solution by inductively coupled plasma revealed, in addition to gold (0.14 wt%), copper (40.0 wt%), tin (11.9 wt%), and Ni (2.3 wt%) were the other main metals in the WPCBs. A solvent extraction procedure using trioctylamine, as extractant, dissolved in kerosene was employed for the extraction of gold as its anionic chloride-complexes from the leach liquor. The parameters affecting this process including hydrochloric acid concentration, equilibrium time, extractant concentration, initial gold concentration in the sample solution, and the aqueous/organic volume ratio were optimized by means of the statistical technique response surface methodology (RSM). Under the optimized extraction conditions, 99.6% of gold and 23.4% of copper were transferred into the organic phase, while the extracted percentage of other metal ions were negligible. Selective back-extraction by the solution 0.1 M NaOH resulted in the selective precipitation of copper, while the raffinate contained just gold ions.