ALL YOU NEED IS CORN….

Corn has always, among indigenous people of the Americas, been considered a sacred plant. Corn is one of the “three sisters” used in companion planting to provide complete dietary needs—the other two being beans and squash…

Now, apparently, corn may be the key ingredient for a more environmental small scale gold mining sector.

Recently, there has been much buzz in the ethical sourcing and mining community over a paper published in Popular Science which outlines the use of cornstarch in precious metal extraction.

Quoting from the article: “The interaction between the starch fragment and the gold allows the precious metal to be selectively recovered from other materials, including platinum, palladium and others. The researchers already developed a process to isolate gold from scraps, and they hope this will lead to an environmentally friendly, cheap way to recover gold from anything.”

A more technical research paper about the process is published in Nature Communications.

From lab to application is a long process. It may be years before this new method, if proven successful, is adopted among in the small scale mining communities which are most damaging to the environment—for these places lack technical expertise and resources to change.

Nevertheless, the technology, if it proves to be workable, is an exciting breakthrough…

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