Highlights of the Salt Extraction Process

Increasing awareness of the growing environmental concerns regarding toxic metals ending up in the biosphere and higher demand to find secondary sources for metal values necessitate that design of new processes for metal extraction is assigned high priority. The important criteria are: a) The new concepts are economically viable, both with respect to investment costs as well as running costs. b) These new processes do not lead to further contamination of the environment; but instead result in a cleaning-up of the already contaminated areas c) The processes must use, to the greatest extent possible, green energy and avoid fossil fuels. d) Raw materials are exploited that presently are regarded as waste and dumped as land-fill e.g. flue dust, slag, metal scrap and oxides. A novel process route, based on chloride metallurgy, has been developed to meet these criteria. This new process, named the Salt Extraction Process, enables the recovery of metals from a variety of sources such as metal scrap, silicate based ores (such as laterites), metallurgical slag and dust and is highly feasible in many fields of applications. The process is capable of handling raw materials with even mixtures containing different metals