precious metal recycling

I just had one of the first years make a boat load of the starting material he and I will both be using for our projects over the summer. He scaled up enough to use all of the remaining iridium (Ir) which was in the department, meaning that if we ever need to make this material again, we will have to buy more Ir. Iridium is pretty expensive, at the current market prices it costs just a tad under the price of gold, but that doesn't reflect the actual obtainable price because there are a lot more people out in the world dealing gold than iridium. Strem will sell the hexachloroiridate salt for 50$ per gram.

I've embarked upon recycling the iridium waste in the division for both practical reasons as well as pure interest in the brute force methods required to recover iridium residues back into usable materials. The procedure is basically this:
1. collect the waste
2. evaporate the low boiling solvents (<100 degrees C with partial vacuum)
3. evaporate the high boiling materials (heating mantle at about 300 degrees C)
4. fire the residues to ash (Bunsen burner with the air mixer open pretty far)
5. crush the ash and fire to redness (Meker burner with the air mixer open as far as possible.)
That gets to the raw metal, which is where I'll leave it for now. I think this whole process is pretty interesting, so I'll keep the individual steps updated on the blog. The method isn't proprietary and can be found in "The Journal of Less Common Metals", a tome of which I have never seen nor heard of until I starting this process.