Valorisation and Integration of Extractive Waste Towards the Sustainability of Raw Mat. Industry

Purpose and goal

The metals production industry has been generating vast quantities of waste. It is necessary to maximize the potential of this waste via material utilization. ValorWaste will focus on valorization of mine and mineral wastes to achieve the following principal goal - investigating the extraction of remaining valuable metals, industrial minerals, PGMs (platinum group metals) and CRMs (critical raw materials) The main goal of Chalmers´s activities will be to utilize novel hydrometallurgical techniques to recover critical metals with the most environmentally friendly approach.

Expected effects and result

Utilization of mining waste is going to bring several improvements to the mining industry. We will decrease the amount of the waste for the landfills. Moreover we are going to unlock sources of platinum group metals and critical raw materials from the secondary resources. Novel hydrometallurgical approaches will decrease the environmental effect of the metal industry and will bring new possibilities for the producers of the alternative reagents. Possibly new routes for the waste valorization will be proposed to maximize its material potential.

Planned approach and implementation

The project has seven work packages. Chalmers is active the most in the work package 2 and is responsible for the task Assessing the potential of hydrometallurgical recovery of CRMs.