As a leader in the mining industry, Barry Kevin O'Rourke has a proven track record extracting precious minerals in Guyana. As managing director of S.A.B. Mining, Barry Kevin O'Rourke has maintained the success of the company and made a significant impact in the worldwide gold and mining industry.
Not all gold mining is done in the ground. Electronic waste (e-waste), discarded electronic devices, can be recycled to extract and purify metals for further industrial application. According to an article in the journal Nature, gold is the most valuable component in such waste.
Over the years, various gold-extraction techniques for e-waste recycling have been developed. Some of these techniques build on the special properties of artificial materials called gold absorbents. Some absorbents are nanoporous polymers (large molecules) that work by temporarily binding other atoms to charged gold atoms (gold ions) and immobilizing the ions in a porous membrane. Other absorbents work by separating oxygen-containing functional groups from gold through a chemical process called reduction.
A prominent issue with gold extraction from e-waste is the lack of a technique that is capable of extracting trace amounts of the metal from e-waste with high precision. The aforementioned absorbents work efficiently when gold concentrations are between 500 ppm and 3,000 ppm. E-waste typically has a lower concentration of gold, indicating the need for more efficient extraction methods.
