Potassium Xanthates: Powerful Palladium Scavengers

Potassium xanthate derivatives have been employed as metal scavengers because of their chelating ability of two sulfur atoms. Maloney et al. have reported a comparison of the metal scavenging ability between generally used scavengers like thioureas and dithiocarbamates, and xanthate salts type scavengers like potassium isopropylxanthate and potassium ethylxanthate. As a result of the evaluation, by using an antibiotic containing little amounts of residual palladium as a model, it has been shown that potassium xanthates can effectively reduce residual palladium under 1 ppm. Furthermore, it is revealed that iodine-doped potassium xanthates are more effective removing the residual palladium.