There is gold in your poo: chemists

26 March 2015 - 14:13 By Times LIVE
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A toilet. File photo.
A toilet. File photo.
Image: Thinkstock

Human sewage contains metals like gold and silver, as well as rarer elements such as palladium and vanadium according to work presented at the 249 National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

Using data gathered from the  U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Geological Survey researchers found that biosolids contain between 28-30 mg of silver per kilogram of waste, up to 638 mg of copper and between 36-49 mg of vanadium according to IFLScience.

Which translates into a million Americans' sewage being worth about R154 million.

Before you stop flushing the toilet and start calling the result "retirement savings", scientists haven't quite worked out how to figure out what metals are in your poo, and how to recover them. Their data is from sewage treatment plants.

They are working on it though.

“If you can get rid of some of the nuisance metals that currently limit how much of these biosolids we can use on fields and forests, and at the same time recover valuable metals and other elements, that’s a win-win,” lead researcher Kathleen Smith said.

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