Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene January - February 2016 vol.11 no.1 | Page 13

NEWS in brief

Global Highlights

New Catalytic Process Treats Cyanide in Industrial
Waste

Norway and UNEP sign $10 Million Programme
Cooperation Agreement

Chemists
at
the
University of
Amsterdam
h a v e
discovered a
new process
for removing
cyanide from
industrial
“Rig,” Nicholas A. Tonelli © 2012
wastewater.

On the margins of
COP21, Mr. Steiner
met with Børge Brende
at the Norwegian
Embassy in Paris to
sign the agreement and
discuss the process of
negotiations at the
climate conference.

The new process “has been shown to reduce CN–
concentrations by 90 percent within minutes from
wastewater simulating that’s produced at steel mills. Higher
destruction efficiencies — up to 99.9 percent — can be
achieved,” Chemical Engineering reported, citing the
researchers.
The backdrop: “The typical sources of cyanide
contamination are industrial waste from plating and mining
industries, burning coal and plastics, and effluent from
publicly owned treatment works. In wastewater, the EPA
specifies cyanide discharge limits by industry and size of the
facility (<38,000 or >38,000 liters per day),” according to a
paper published by Thermo Scientific.
The new process aims to simplify cyanide control, relying
on a simple metallic salt as a catalyst. The composition and
price of the salt “are such that it can easily be applied to
a large-scale process without any economic penalty,” said
Gadi Rothenberg, one of the researchers. “The catalyst can
be used in either small-scale batch reactors or large-scale
packed-bed continuous reactors,” the report said.
So far, the process has been tested at steel mills and in the
precious-metals sector, the report said.
With precious metals, “the process volumes are smaller,
but the CN– concentrations are much higher (up to 10,000
times higher). In a collaboration with Germany’s oldest gold
and silver refining company, Heimerle + Meule GmbH,
tests on industrial samples have demonstrated a similar 99.9
percent CN–removal efficiency within minutes,” the report
said, ci