Industrial and secondary gold-bearing waste and gold recovery techniques: Review

Great amounts of industrial and secondary waste accumulated at the moment contain gold. Such waste requires certain approach to the noble metal recovery with regard to specific material constitution and gold occurrence forms. This article offers a review of gold-bearing industrial and domestic waste. There are 11 types of industrial and secondary waste generated in the mining-and-processing industry, metallurgy, municipal engineering and power sector. For each type, the article describes the form of gold occurrence, size, content, deposits in Russia and recovery methods. Conventionally, the gold recovery techniques are divided into three groups: concentrating, hydrometallurgical (chemical treatment) and pyrometallurgical (thermal treatment). The hydrometallurgical techniques, in particular, cyanation, are the most common as they offer higher gold recovery of 80–99%. At the same time, such methods affect the environment, need much investment and time, and offer low recovery of microand ultra-fine gold, while such gold features high content in mining, processing and metallurgical waste. The processing methods are efficient in extraction of fine gold from mining-and-processing waste. Regarding micron size gold, the most promising approach is pyrometallurgy, in particular, melting of waste with subsequent purging of the melt as it is only possible to enlarge gold microdrops in molten state.

Fedorov S. A., Amdur A. M., Malyshev A. N., Karimova P. F. Industrial and secondary gold-bearing waste and gold recovery techniques: Review. MIAB. Mining Inf. Anal. Bull. 2021;(11-1):346—365. [In Russ]. DOI: 10.25018/0236_1493_2021_111_0_346.

The study was carried out under R&D State Contract with the Ural State Mining University, Contract No. 075-03-2021-303 as of 29 December 2020.

Fedorov S. A.^1,2, Post-Graduate Student, Junior Researcher, e-mail: saf13d@mail.ru;
Amdur A. M.², Head of the Chemistry Department Professor, Doctor of Engineering Sciences, e-mail: engineer-ektb@rambler.ru;
Malyshev A. N.², Laboratory Research Assistant, Student, e-mail: malyshev.k1b@gmail.com;
Karimova P. F.², Laboratory Research Assistant, Student, e-mail: pauline.spring@yandex.ru;
¹ Institute of Metallurgy, Ural Branch, Russian Academy of Science, Yekaterinburg, Russia;
² Ural State Mining University, Yekaterinburg, Russia.

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