Re: Misc: Silver Reclaimation (from Silver Staining)
David A. Schooley (schooley@med.unr.edu)
Tue, 23 Nov 1999 17:07:08 -0800
Chuck-
I DON'T think you are wasting your time- it is a
non-renewable resource! All the more so if you are generating a LOT
of waste. You can easily precipitate the Ag as an halide salt
(chloride is obviously cheapest), and the flocculent precipitate is
easily filtered. In old chemistry handboooks there are receipes for
putting AgCl in a crucible with charcoal and a flux (sodium carbonate
as I recall), and heating it in a muffle furnace to around 1000 deg
C. You get a big button of metallic As, MP 960 C.
Most "insoluble" silver salts are soluble in STRONG ammonia!
When I lived in Palo Alto, CA, they SOLD their sewage sludge
to a gold mining company to reclaim traces of gold from
electroplating waste from all the local semiconductor companies!
David
David A. Schooley
Dept. of Biochemistry/330
Univ. of Nevada
Reno, NV 89557
schooley@unr.edu
tel: (775) 784-4136; fax (775) 784-1419
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