Why we built non-cyanide gold leaching from day one
Cyanide gold leaching still dominates the recovery industry. Here's why PolyGO refused to build on it — and what the non-cyanide alternative actually looks like in production.
Cyanide leaching has been the default gold-recovery chemistry for over a century, and for good reason — it works. But the regulatory environment, the insurance environment, and the workforce environment around it have all moved on. PolyGO was founded on the bet that the recovery industry needed a non-cyanide chemistry that did not compromise on yield.
What 'non-cyanide' actually changes
The headline change is operator safety and permitting. Removing cyanide removes an entire category of acute hazard from the site, simplifies the safety case, and eases what is typically the longest item on a new line's critical path: environmental permitting.
Downstream, the effluent profile changes too. Non-cyanide leachates are easier to treat, fit modern discharge regimes by default, and pair cleanly with our precipitation and resin polishing products.
The yield question
The fair criticism of older non-cyanide alternatives was that they bought safety at the cost of yield. Our reformulated gold leaching chemistry was specifically engineered to close that gap on industrial feedstocks — and on the reference deployments we run today, recovery rates are in the same band as comparable cyanide processes.
We will not, however, claim universal parity. On any given feedstock the honest answer comes from the feasibility study, not from a brochure. Send us a sample.
