Highly efficient and selective extraction of gold by reduced graphene oxide

• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32204-4
• Publication Date: 2022-08-02T11:09:35Z
• Authors: Fei Li; Jiuyi Zhu; Pengzhan Sun; Mingrui Zhang; Zhenqing Li; Dingxin Xu; Xinyu Gong; Xiaolong Zou; A. K. Geim; Yang Su; Hui-Ming Cheng
• Keywords: Gold extraction

Materials that are capable of extracting gold from complex sources, especially electronic waste (e-waste) with high efficiency needed for resource sustainability and effective e-waste recycling. However, it remains challenging to achieve extraction capacity trace amount gold, precise selectivity over a wide range co-existing elements. Here we report reduced graphene oxide (rGO) material has an ultrahigh amounts (1,850 mg/g 1,180 10 ppm 1 gold). The excellent behavior is accounted the areas oxidized regions rGO. spontaneously reduce ions metallic provide good dispersibility so efficient adsorption reduction by area can be realized. rGO also highly selective ions. By controlling protonation process functional groups on rGO, shows exclusive without 14 elements seen in e-waste. These discoveries further exploited efficient, continuous recycling scalability economic viability, as exemplified using membrane based flow-through process.