Research from Imperial College London suggests that gold compouds recovered from discarded SIMcards can significantly lower the cost of making medicines.
Electronic gadgets are a potpourri of pricey and rare elements, but a majority of them end up piling up in an e-waste landfill instead of being recycled. That’s not because we lack the tech to recycle it, but due to factors like cost management and process efficiency. SIM cards are among the phone parts that end up going to waste without much uptake in terms of recycling efforts.
That’s not a very economically sound process, both at an individual level as well as an industrial scale. The biggest problem is the extraction methods, which are complex and expensive. In response, professors Angela Serpe and Paola Deplano at the University of Cagliari in Italy developed an easy method of recovering gold and other precious metals from electronics.
How all of this works The team applied the gold compound as a catalyst in multiple chemical reactions for making medicines such as pain-relief and anti-inflammatory drugs. To their surprise, the gold “waste: at their hand “performed as well, or better, than the currently used catalysts.” Leftover SIMs=cheaper meds The paper adds that “even unoptimized, small-scale production” of the gold catalyst, which is obtained in the form of a black crystalline solid, is significantly cheaper than the traditional options currently being used in the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, it is also far less damaging to the environment than gold mining operations.
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