Newspaper filters out gold

摘要

Ordinary newspaper can be used to recover precious metals from industrial wastewater, say researchers in Japan. Katsutoshi Inoue, and coworkers from Saga University, formed an active gel by treating newspaper with p-aminobenzoic acid - a readily available compound used in sunscreen. Inoue shows that when water is passed through a column packed with this modified paper, gold, palladium and platinum are filtered out in preference to other metals.