Gold Extraction Methods

Alluvial gold is extracted using a rocker and cradle or simple sluice and various panning techniques.
Reef gold is imbedded in quartz rock, which has to be crushed to release the gold caught in the seams.

Ore Treatment
The ore after crushing went through a screen, with the assistance of water and ran over a flat area
that was treated with, firstly, copper sheet, cyanide paste and then mercury. Mercury has a chemical
affinity with gold, silver and other metals.
As the processed ore runs over this area, the gold attaches itself to the mercury while the rest of the
ore passes through to the tailings dump.
Eventually the cyanide, mercury and gold are scraped up and placed in a retort, where the mixture is
heated until the cyanide and mercury evaporate off and are recycled, leaving the gold behind.
The cyanide paste acts as a buffer so that scrapings of copper do not contaminate the separated gold.
The extraction is a dirty process, often doing environmental damage and causing lung damage and
deafness to the workers, as well as the dangers of mercury and cyanide poisoning.

Clean, cheap method for extracting gold

discovered by accident
Researchers stumble upon a method that could replace toxic cyanide
with plain old cornstarch.

Until the 17th century, alchemists tried to transform base materials into gold. And
given that in all of human history only an estimated 171,300 metric tons of gold

have ever been mined less than one ounce of gold per person alive right now
its no wonder that early chemists spent their lifetimes trying to create the rare and
valuable metal out of common materials.
Humans are hungry for gold, and as the price of gold has steadily soared over the
last decade, we continue to seek ways to get our hands on it, not only from ores,
but from the waste of electronic products where it is commonly bound. By some
accounts, "deposits of gold in electronic waste are around 50 times richer than ore
mined from the ground."
Yet gold is tricky to extract, and contemporary methods include the use of a very
icky (scientific term), highly toxic combination of cyanide salts. The cyanide leaches
the gold out, but the cyanide seeps into the ground.
But as with many of the greatest scientific discoveries, Northwestern University
researchers had a serendipitous moment when they were attempting to create
three-dimensional cubes out of gold and starch for use as storage containers for
gases and small molecules.
Sir Fraser Stoddart, a chemistry professor at the university, along with Zhichang Liu
and his team, stumbled upon a solution that uses cheap, common, toxin-tame
cornstarch instead of cyanide.
Zhichang stumbled on a piece of magic for isolating gold from anything in a green
way, Stoddart said in a statement.
The chemistry behind the process isnt for the feeble-brained. (For details, see
Selective isolation of gold facilitated by second-sphere coordination with cyclodextrin, at Nature Communications.) But the gist of it is that alphacyclodextrin, a cyclic starch fragment with six glucose molecules, can be used to

selectively recover gold from different materials, including platinum, palladium and
others.
The team has already developed a method to isolate gold from scraps using
cornstarch, and they hope this will lead to an eco-friendly and affordable way to
recover gold from other sources as well.
The alchemists would be envious.