Activated carbon has been the media of choice for the gold sector for over a century. While activated carbon is the current standard, it suffers from a number of shortcomings. Its selectivity for gold is not exclusive. It attracts other metals from the pregnant leach solution in addition to gold, including copper, mercury, and other base metals, which reduces its capacity to capture gold. In addition, activated carbon suffers from mechanical breakdown over time, with the result that some gold captured by the product becomes unrecoverable. As a result of this and other inefficiencies associated with activated carbon, up to 5 to 10% of gold contained in a cyanide leach solution routinely remains in the solution and is not recovered by activated carbon during the process. Breakdown of activated carbon also results in carbon fines, small particles that range in size from dust to 0.7mm, that are not captured by screens and are therefore lost to the overall process.

 IXOS^® has been demonstrated to capture up to 99% of gold from cyanide leach solutions in laboratory and mine site testing where the data was analyzed by the mine operator, representing a material increase relative to activated carbon, which recovers between 85% and 95% of the gold, as reported by potential mining customers of IXOS^®. Additionally, the increased selectivity of IXOS^® results in the capture of fewer other competitive base metals. Testing at multiple mine sites has shown more than 90% gold purity captured on IXOS^®, as opposed to 40%-70% for those generated by activated carbon, resulting in efficiencies in the refining process used to generate higher purities of gold.