Selective Recovery of Platinum Group Metals and Gold from Waste Streams
This research community develops chemical methods to selectively extract and recover precious metals—primarily platinum, palladium, gold, and rhodium—from complex liquid waste streams, spent automotive catalysts, and electronic waste.
The work centers on designing porous materials, including covalent organic frameworks, metal-organic frameworks, and polymer inclusion membranes, to capture specific metal ions from aqueous solutions. Recurring methods involve solvent extraction, adsorption, and the use of ionic liquids or hydrochloric acid leachates to isolate target metals. The primary application is the efficient separation of platinum group metals from spent automotive catalysts and the recovery of gold from end-of-life electronics. Recent efforts also explore photocatalytic reduction and the integration of recovered metals into new catalytic materials, such as gold-loaded frameworks for chemical synthesis.
Palladium research accounts for the largest share of this community's output, representing 3.1% of all tracked palladium research, followed by platinum at 2.1% and rhodium at 2.8%. In terms of absolute volume, platinum has the highest paper count with 3,133 papers, while palladium follows closely with 3,014.
The community comprises 13,540 papers, publishing most frequently in Analytica Chimica Acta, Talanta, and Analytical Chemistry.
Recent work focuses on engineering covalent organic frameworks with specific nitrogen or sulfur sites to achieve high selectivity for gold and palladium capture from electronic waste and acidic wastewater, often combining adsorption with photoreduction steps to isolate the metal.