Grant: Engage Grants Program

Gold is one of the most expensive precious metals, and is widely used for both jewelery and components in a variety of well known advanced materials. Barrick Gold Corporation is one of the world's largest mining companies that produces gold from ore by leaching followed by adsorption onto activated carbon. However, activated carbon is very expensive and is not selective to gold as they co-adsorb other metals. Barrick refines them in a separate process to produce pure gold. Moreover, elution of gold from activated carbon is very difficult as physical adsorption takes place where gold is trapped inside the micro-pore of carbon particles. To overcome this problem, in this industrial research a cost-effective, sustainable, and efficient process will be developed for Barrick to recover pure gold through biosorption. This biosorption will use adsorbents prepared from cellulosic biomass wastes, such as wood wastes/saw dust, waste paper/cardboard, waste cotton, etc. Every day thousands of tons of solid cellulose-based biomass wastes are being generated in Canada. Cellulose has a strong affinity to gold as determined by our previous research. With this innovative industrial research, those cellulosic biomass wastes will be converted into bio-adsorbents for gold recovery from metallurgical solutions in a very simple and cheap process as mentioned in the research proposal. Effective use of such cellulosic biomass wastes as valuable bioadsorbents will not only reduce the volume of wastes being generated every day, but will also have a high end value to the gold mining industry as this cheap bioadsorbent will have superior performance over the traditionally used activated carbon. The proposed efficient, cost-effective, and green technology will make the gold recovery process more attractive to the gold mining industries. Both Barrick Gold Corporation and waste management companies will benefit from this research.