Materials Beneficiation

Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to provide a broad, comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of current beneficiation techniques and processes that are used for both metallic and nonmetallic minerals; and for other materials, such as household and industrial solid wastes, that are also processed by conventional beneficiation methods in their standard methods of recycling and reclamation. Conservation of natural resources is an adjunct of beneficiation in that we have used up once-available deposits of high-grade ores, leaving only the low-grade deposits that must be beneficiated to upgrade them to sufficiently high levels for processing and metal recovery by current extractive technology. Conservation is also important in the reclamation and recycling of indestructible, noncorrosive materials, so that they may be recovered and reused many times over. The mainly physical, relatively uncomplicated, beneficiation treatments also save large quantities of energy, as these comparatively simple operations are all relatively low energy consumers, when compared with the later separation operations of pyro and electrical nature, which are very high energy consumers. Environmentally, both air and water pollution from beneficiation treatments are either quite low or can easily be controlled, and are gas-free and operated at ambient temperature, to make them one of the cleaner and lower polluting processes used in material treatments.