Re: Recovering Pt/Pd from used processing solution

> Dear Peter,
> On the 29th of October you asked if it is possible to recover the 80 %
> of
> Pt/Pd lost from the processing solution.
> I put nearly the same question to Mike Ware some months ago.His answer
> was,I
> quote :
> You raise a sensitive point,and one that is not often grasped.The honest
> answer is : No, I do not recover my precious metal residues. The reason
> is I
> use so little , it is so dilute as not to be economically worthwhile.
> If I
> were printing commercially I would recover Pt,Pd and Au. The methods
> really
> require laboratory facilities - at least a fume hood - and you can find
> the
> chemical details for Platinum recovery in a multi-volume work called
> "Inorganic Syntheses"
> Putting the economic considerations aside , I don't think you need worry
> about the environmental consequences of discharging small amounts of
> these
> substances to the sewage system.The noble metal is probably
> precipitated at
> an early stage.Far more platinum and palladium is now coming out of car
> exhausts".
>
> Kind regards
>
> Erich
>
>
I think there are some people on this list who use enough platinum for it
to be worth considering, and certainly there are labs which offer platinum
printing, so I wonder if they recover it.

The platinum would presumably mainly end up in the developer, which would
probably get a reasonably high concentration over time. We once made a
lump of silver about the size of a golf ball from the residues in the
college lab, and I think it supplied the jewellery course we ran for a
while.

Peter Marshall
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Received on Wed Nov 12 16:12:25 2003