Live Annotation: E-Waste

To delve deeper into Delftia topics and foster our growing community of annotators, we will be presenting live annotation sessions! Take part in this event (and those in the future) to meet your peers, practice reading scientific literature, and learn about how Delftia could change our world.

This week we’ll be looking at how Delftia could recover gold from electronic waste. Each year, we discard 50 million tons of e-waste while only recycling 12% (source). Current recycling creates harmful byproducts and is energy-intensive. We need to not only recycle more e-waste, but also recycle better.

Delftia can biomineralize gold, so why couldn’t it be used for gold recovery from e-waste? Before this can become a reality, we must establish a protocol for the use of Delftia‘s biomineralization abilities.

• What is the efficiency of Delftia cultures versus purified delftibactin? Could we use another organism to make more delftibactin?
• What are the ideal conditions for delftibactin production and action?
• What is the cost and energy required for gold recovery using this method?
• What are the implications? What byproducts are produced, and how will they be handled?

Unfortunately, available literature on Delftia is disjointed, and there is no comprehensive review for these topics. Therefore, we must search for the answers ourselves! We use the Hypothes.is annotation platform to highlight our findings, discuss the text, and share our thoughts!

See you in the margins!