Recovery of Gold and Copper from Alkaline Cyanide-Starved Glycine Solutions Using Sulfide Precipitation and Ion-Exchange

Abstract

A novel glycine-based leach system was recently proposed, and it has been proved to be effective for copper and gold extraction. The synergetic glycine-cyanide system is particularly effective for treating copper-gold resources. To further improve this process and pave the way to scale-up the process from bench-scale to pilot-scale testing, detailed studies of two recovery technologies i.e. sulfide precipitation and ion-exchange adsorption for gold and copper recovery from the cyanide-starved glycine system were investigated.