Horse Thoughts
i got rid of all my social media, i don't use youtube or twitch or play video games anymore (taking a year break), and i don't really do much else on the internet. reading lots of books, staring at my piles of unfinished projects. i figure something's gotta give eventually. idk it seems like the era of meeting people online and forming meaningful connections has long been over and i'm just burning out on being in denial. i'd like to continue to build out this site as a place to document all the different things i do, but i find myself wondering "to what end?"
oh and the reason i haven't posted in almost two years on here is that life is hell for everyone and i'm no exception. horses are people too or whatever.
over the first few weeks of the new year, i have been continuing to experiment with alkaline glycine leaching of base metals as a renewable process for liberating gold from plated printed circuit boards. before i get into the details, i need to reiterate something for my own sake that has cost me many hours on multiple occasions: when trying out novel techniques from a paper, run the calculations on the numbers to determine the scale of the process for a useful result.
i've been hyperfixating on gold recovery from ewaste and looking at ways to do it without the use of mineral acids where possible, and minimizing the loss of reagents. it's all very arbitrary and subjective, but i decided to put down some of my thoughts over at the alkaline glycine process page with some photos of my first experiments with the procedure. eventually i'd like to make a video overview of the process once i've gone through it fully myself (waste/input material -> dissolution of base metals -> filter solids -> dissolution of precious metals -> filter and discard solids -> recovery of complexed base and precious metals -> purification and reuse of ligand solution).
