The practice of using tiny amounts of conductive gold in our millions of printed circuit boards has already sent a precious chunk of the world’s total gold stores into its landfills and, despite our best recycling efforts, out of our reach. Now, a Scottish research team plans to get it back.

University of Edinburgh scientists recently demonstrated a new process for recovering gold from discarded electronics with a specially engineered compound that separates it from surrounding materials, and which is safer and more effective at the task than any previous methods. Their study involved submerging printed circuit boards in “mild acid” to dissolve all metal parts, after which researchers added an “oily liquid containing the team’s chemical compound,” which allows them to then selectively extract gold from the broken-down mixture of metals.