Treatment Of Precious Metal Bearing Recycled Materials At UM's Hoboken Smelter

In Union Minière's Hoboken smelter and refinery for complex non-ferrous materials, the treatment of recycling products, containing precious metals, occupies a dominant place. For all feed materials, the first step, prior to their treatment, is to classify them in order toselect an accurate and economical procedure for sampling as well as to dispatch them to the optimal process scheme. More than 150 different procedures for sampling are commonly used. The most important ones are briefly discussed in the paper. Precious metals bearing recycling materials vary widely with respect to their physical aspect, their chemical composition and the value of their precious metal content. All these parameters are taken into consideration to select the most appropriate process among the multiple possibilities of Union Minière's flexible integrated flow-sheet. Different stages of the operations as well as the main flow-sheets are described.