SAINT-PIERRE-LES-NEMOURS, France — A small French start-up company is selling a technology with a hint of alchemy: turning water into gold.
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It does so by extracting from industrial waste water the last traces of any rare — and increasingly valuable — metal.
“We leave only a microgramme per litre,” according to Steve van Zutphen, a Dutchman who founded Magpie Polymers last year with a fellow 30-year old Frenchman Etienne Almoric.
“It’s the equivalent of a sugar lump in an Olympic swimming pool.”
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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 grammes of precious metal, equivalent to “3,000 to 5,000 euros ($3,900 to $6,500),” Almoric said.
Mobile phones, catalytic converters and countless other everyday products contain these precious metals.
But once they are scrapped, the problem lies in retrieving the particles of precious metals.
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Magpie’s technology can also be used to leach out harmful metals such as lead, mercury, cobalt, copper and uranium.
“Obviously the amounts are much bigger. The problem is that nobody wants to pay for something that has no value,” said Almoric. |
