Highly-efficient recovery of silver from industrial cyanide-based plating effluent on TiO/activated carbon composites.

The release of silver-containing wastewater is an economic loss. In this works, the silver ions in the cyanide-based plating effluent of jewelry effluent was systematic recovered by the photocatalytic process using commercial semiconductors (TiO, ZnO, BiO and WO) and activated carbon (AC) enhanced semiconductors as the photocatalysts. The preliminary results demonstrated that the highest photocatalytic silver recovery was achieved via the use of TiO nanoparticles (NPs), ascribing to its better textural property that provided abundant active sites to undergo the reaction.