Water that has trickled through copper bearing ore will have the characteristic color of copper solutions. One method used to recover the copper dissolved in such streams is to place scrap iron in wide shallow sections of the stream. See if you can design an experiment to recover the remaining copper left in the copper chloride solution from this experiment.I don‘t understand this. Why is scrap iron used. How and what experiment am I supposed to come up with
Iron is more reactive than copper, so it will displace copper from solution. (The iron dissolves into the solution, and the copper precipitates out.) You could try plain steel wool (without built-in soap) as a source of the iron for this experiment. It has lots of surface area, so the iron will react more quickly than, say, the iron in a nail.
