Old Tailings Pond Integrated Lead And Zinc Recovery Applications

Lead-zinc mineral resources are abundant in China; data from the USGS (United States Geological Survey) shows that China possesses the maximum amount of lead and zinc resources in the world. With the booming economy and demand for products, exploitation scale of China mining has expanded accordingly. Nevertheless, effluent and tailings from concentrators are intemperately discharged, which has greatly undermined substantial development and endangered ecological environment throughout mining areas. In the wake of growing environmental awareness, alone with gradual exhaustion of ores, owing to the development of mineral processing technology, recycling and reusing lead-zinc tailings has become an inexorable trend, since it brings certain profit.An enterprise keeps at least a million tons tailings in the tailing pound for years of producing. The tailings contain about 0.7wt% Pb,2.5wt% Zn and 30,000 tons valuable metals, which, through a primary analysis and study, can be recovered by using an advisable beneficiation method. Zinc oxide dominates the zinc in these tailings; however, separation indicator is commonly unfavorable under the very circumstances. The ultimate goal of this project focuses on production and application.A reasonable process is introduced in this paper that all process water of the new tailings concentration plant is supplied with raw high calcium effluent from the lead-zinc concentrator (2000 tons per day), in order to economically recycle and reuse zinc of the tailings with a high recovery rate.Having conducted various beneficiation tests, full flotation without deslimed is highly recommended as the optimum process for recycling zinc oxide ore from the tailings. The lab flotation results show that zinc oxide concentrate with grade of 25.00% and recovery of over 70.00% were obtained; the pilot plant flotation results show that zinc oxide concentrate with grade of 25.00% and recovery of over 55.00% were obtained.