Silver recovery process

Abstract

Abstract Silver is recovered from silver-containing scrap paper (e.g., scrap thermographic office copy paper) by a process which involves conditioning the silver-containing paper (e.g., with hot dilute aqueous sodium hydroxide) to thereby convert the silver in the paper from its usual organic acid salt form (e.g., silver behenate) into a different form of silver (e.g., converted into silver metal or some silver oxide) which is more readily converted into silver cyanide than is the organic acid salt of silver, and simultaneously or subsequently treating the new silver form with a silver-cyanide forming reagent (e.g., a dilute aqueous sodium cyanide solution) to thereby form silver cyanide. Metallic silver can then be recovered from the resulting silver cyanide solution by standard processing (e.g., zinc dust precipitation in the Merrill-Crowe process) as known in the art.

Inventors

• 👤 Adrian C Dorenfeld
• 👤 Gust Bitsianes

Bibliographic Details