Investigating the effectiveness of bamboo based cyanide in gold leaching

Abstract

There are many different gold extraction techniques that have been employed worldwide but however they are effective to some degrees because of their operational difficulties, diverse effects on the environment and people, complicated industrial setup which calls for alternatives. Bamboo's ability to produce cyanogenic glycosides can be used because gold cyanidation is straightforward and has a high gold dissolving efficiency. Gold ore samples of low concentration obtained from Tiira gold field were used. The Bamboo cyanide co ncentration of 3091.88ppm, from the Bamboo type was also used in the study. The laboratory tests showed that cyanide obtained from crushing 2kg of cassava, was able to leached 61.6% of gold at pH of 10-12, contact time of 24hours and at room temperature.