Amigo, have you been to Bunnings lately and bought some treated...

Amigo, have you been to Bunnings lately and bought some treated pine. It is treated with CCA = chrome copper and arsenic. The arsenic is imported from China, and it has an in-ground basic value of about $1,000 per ton. The recent metallurgy by SXG shows the arsenic is separable from gold and antimony by flotation - the gold is also separated by magnetic methods. Why do I bother responding to people like you. I must be crazy.


Where do I start?

CCA is not Copper, Chome and Arsenic as individual species. It is Copper Chrome Arsenate, a solution that you have correctly identified as a wood treatment. It is highly toxic, and you cannot use the treated timber for furniture, vegie gardens etc. It is banned in a lot of countries, and Australia is looking to phase it out with preference to other non-Arsenic treatments. Yes, it all comes from China, as few other countries will touch Arsenic.

The Metallurgy does not show that the Arsenic is separable from gold and Antimony using flotation. Note you are not floating Antimony and Arsenic, you are floting minerals, namely Stibnite and Arsenopyrite. And they are both associated with Gold. If you can control the flotation process enough, after getting exactly the right liberation, you may be able to create a Gold/Stibnite concentrate with low enough arsenic to sell. (Needs to be below 5000ppm or 0.5% to sell to a chinese copper smelter, who take nearly 100% of all gold concentrates). And you live with the penalties. This concentrate is likely to only contain less than half the gold. The rest is in the Stibnite concentrate, which contains up to 5-12% Arsenic so is highly toxic.

I must have missed the memo on gold being magnetic.

Either way, if you can separate the gold and Antimony from the Arsenic, the Arsenic then has to go to a tails dam. with 0.5% Arsenic in the feed, therefore tails, that is a massive environmental issue. Not only polluting the environment, but also creating major Goechemical issues affecting tails dam stability.

Michael Hudson stated that the Metallurgy is simple and easy. It is far from it unfortunately.

As for your last two sentences, you might be better off following a company like NAG, where the chat content seems to be more about abusing each other than a quality discussion.