Environmental
pollution and resource shortage are two major challenges
facing the world today, and resourcization of precious metals is one
of the effective strategies to confront these problems. Precious metals,
known for their high performance and scarcity, are indispensable our
current lives. As nonrenewable resources, the demand and consumption
of precious metals are increasing every year. Therefore, it is necessary
to develop green and efficient precious metal recovery technologies
to alleviate the environmental and resource crisis. This perspective
summarizes various typical precious metal recovery strategies and
pays attention to innovations from traditional technologies. We also
evaluate and prospect the above methods based on secondary pollution
and recovery efficiency.
Gold
and palladium are the most widely used precious metal materials
in the field of electronic devices and industrial catalysis. How to
realize the green recycling of gold and palladium is important and
challenging. In this work, we found that gold and palladium in wastes,
such as electronic devices and industrial catalysts, can be completely
dissolved and recycled by photocatalysis. Gold and palladium are oxidized
to the ionic state in water, which does not involve strong acids,
strong alkalis, toxic cyanides, or an organic medium. More interestingly,
the dissolution of gold and palladium in different halogen aqueous
solutions has special selectivity, which depends on the coordination
stability constants between gold and palladium with halide ions. Therefore,
gold and palladium can be selectively dissolved in iodine ion solution
and bromine ion solution, respectively, then gold and palladium can
be obtained by a one-step reduction. This work opens up a new direction
for optimizing the photocatalytic dissolution technology and promoting
the green recycling of precious metals.
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