Safe and sustainable gold recovery is an important concern in mining and electronic waste recycling. Polysulfides made by inverse vulcanization and related processes are promising in this regard, but methods to separate the polymer and gold are limited and typically require pyrolysis or chemical degradation of the polymer. Given the efficient thermal depolymerisation of poly-1, it was hypothesised that after poly-1 bound to gold salts, could be thermally depolymerised and separated from the precious metal.