Extract: The process is based on the use of tiny pellets of plastic resin through which waste water is pumped. Gold, platinum, palladium and rhodium, the world's most precious metals, little by little stick to the pellets and are thus separated from the waste water. A single litre of this patented resin can treat five to 10 cubic metres of waste water and recover 50 to 100 grams of precious metal, equivalent to "3,000 to 5,000 euros ($3,900 to $6,500)," Almoric said. http://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/-/world/15237807/modern-alchemy-leaches-gold-from-water/
All sounds very exciting, until you try and figure out where you get 10 cubic meters of water with soluble gold concentration enough to yield 50-100 grams? These resins are nothing new - they have been used in industry for years. If this was treating sea water for gold recovery, you would need to treat at least 10 million cubic metres to yield 50-100g gold - which also means incidentally you would need about 1 million litres of the resin to treat this volume of sea water.
I thought they were referring to concentrated forms, say, mine waste rather than sea water. Obviously such concentrated forms are in limited supplies (as you point out).
This technology is nothing new. I used to work at Beverly Uranium mine in SA, and they use an ion exchange resin too. By the way, the resin is reusable many times, and you usually displace the absorbed metal ions (regenerate the resin and extract the Metals in concentrated form) with someing like sodium chloride (Salt)
"Up to 100 grams of precious metals" in 10 cubic meters of waste water? That seems a lot... I was predicting about 100 times less... Of course: what type of waste water, where from? Because industrial waste water is indeed a lot richer in metals. The source is essential... simple homes won't bring much metals along the drains...
I had some waste water with some gold floating not too long go, wasn't enough in there for me to both picking out though
