Selective recovery of platinum and palladium from Asahi's PLS in chloride medium

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Gold, silver and platinum group metals (PGM) including platinum and palladium are named as "Precious Metals", which are very expensive and are widely used not only as traditional jewelries but also as useful components in a variety of well-known advanced materials including electronic devices. Asahi Refining Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of Asahi Holdings, produces precious metals (gold and silver) by leaching secondary materials coming from the mining and recycling industries including electronic wastes (e-wastes). After leaching, the pregnant leach solution (PLS) contains gold, silver, platinum, palladium and some base metals in a chloride medium. Currently, Asahi Refining only produces metallic gold and silver by recovering them from this leach solution leaving behind all other expensive PGM in the PLS, because they do not have a suitable process yet to selectively recover platinum and palladium in that process conditions. The applicant (Dr. Alam), has extensive experiences recovering different kinds of precious metals including PGM from chloride media using hydrometallurgical techniques. In this proposed project, he will selectively recover the remaining precious metals (platinum and palladium) from the Asahi's PLS using bioadsorbents with novel functional groups prepared from biomass wastes derived from agriculture, forest and marine resources. If the proposed cost-effective, sustainable and environmentally friendly process is successful, it would be an innovative technique to adopt in Asahi's current process flowsheet that will generate extra profit and boost the precious metals recycling business of Asahi Refining.