Abstract
There’s more to gold than a luminous shine. The precious metal also conducts electricity easily and resists corrosion, properties that make it irreplaceable in the electronics industry. Experts estimate it takes at least 1,000 kg of ore to produce 1 g of gold—the same amount that’s used in about 40 mobile phones. Chemists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), discovered a material that can extract gold from solution, which could make mining gold from electronic waste, sewage sludge, and even seawater practical. Pulling gold from waste sources could offer an alternative to digging up ore from the ground. The new gold-grabbing material is a composite made by exposing para-phenylenediamine (pPDA) to the metal-organic framework, or MOF, known as iron-1,3,5-benzenetricarboxylate. The MOF catalyzes the polymerization of pPDA, creating a high-surface-area polymer filled with pores (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2018, DOI: 10.1021/jacs.8b09555). “We’ve opened the polymer up and given
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