Who Likes Platinum?

      By Derek Foshee

      Us humans love metal, especially shiny metal that we can wear such as platinum, however that's not the only thing we do with platinum. One of the biggest industries in the world is the automobile industry and almost every single automobile uses platinum in its catalytic converter to convert environmentally unsafe gasses to more environmentally safe gasses(Hodnik, 2016). Platinum like all precious metals is extremely rare, so it is hard to come by especially as the demand for it increases. This study is looking into ways to extract platinum using ways that are more environmentally friendly.
      The current most common way is to use aqua regia (Hodnik, 2016). This however uses a lot of reagents and produces nauseous fumes that defeats the purpose of sustainability(Hodnik, 2016). The study uses the addition and subtraction of oxidative and reductive conditions in a mild acid called surface potential alteration to leach out platinum in a more environmentally friendly way(Hodnik, 2016).
      This opens up more possibilities in sustaining the current materials we have and can have and even more drastic effect if this can be used with other elements such as gold, silver, and copper. Perhaps one day we won't need catalytic converters on our cars because we switched to electric, but who knows, maybe the batteries powering those future automobiles contain the platinum that used to be on their predecessors.

Figure 1: Proposed oxidation and reduction model for platinum dissolution.

N. Hodnik, C. Baldizzone, G. Polymeros, S. Geiger, J.P. Grote, S. Cherevko, A. Mingers, A. Zeradjanin, K.J.J. Mayrhofer. 2016. Platinum recycling going green via induced surface potential alteration enabling fast and efficient dissolution. Nature Communications. doi:10.1038/ncomms13164