You may get filthy with that kind of sludge, I am not sure filthy rich. One time a promoter who shall remain nameles, Patrick Sheridan, tried to take gold out of sewage sludge. Sewage sludge in Toronto is about 1/10 of an ounce gold. There is a lot of s--t in Toronto. Each person joyfully contributes ore to the mine at a rate of 1 lb per day at least. That is 4.5 million lbs per day or 2250 tons. 225 ounces. You can get the gold out by carbon in pulp technology with cyanide. He took the idea of shipping it by train to Kirkland Lake for processing. (Everybody's favourite garbage dump.) He could get the shipping permit and he could take all the s--t he wanted off Toronto Works for free. They really wanted to give a s--t so to speak. The reason it is in the water and sludge, is partly from the gold in people's teeth, washing of silverware, and jewelry as they bathe. It wears off the millions of rings etc in the chlorinated water, a solvent for gold. Perhaps 1/5,000 of a gram per day per person. (At that rate, of it were all from rings, a wedding ring would last 103 years before it would completely dissolve. People have noticed rings 'wear' over time, a small amount. Water has been widely chlorinated only for the past 50 years. ) The vegetables you eat from the Salinas valley in CA, a known residual gold area, also contain plentiful gold. If you plant oats on an old gold tailings pond they will collect the gold faithfully, and the resulting plants will run up to 1/10 of an ounce! This has been suggested as an economic way of tailing rehab! Birch trees in Timmins over gold zones ran 1000 ppb Au! The bulk of the gold comes directly from food. The sludge acts as a carbon in pulp system to re-concentrate other source of it. CIP will remove the gold. The Kirkland Lake gold from sewage scheme? (I worked for the plant in Timmins where the technology was worked out.) It dies becaus the residents feared the envroinmental character of the tailings. It was to be dried and put in landfill. They thought the tailings water would have pathogens. Extremely unlikely given the cyanide process. Given that it was a mining town you would think they would have had more sense. And the sludge does not even smell. It has seen far too much processing for that. The government got in the way too, as there had to be storage of the waste which became plant feed, and there was a potential run-off problem. They did not exactly like the group that was proposing to do it, as they had taken them to court on PCB's in old transformers on their properties that had government removal orders and won.
EC<:-} |
