Lead smelting industry structure

This part of the text covers the general structure of the lead smelting industry, including its scope, its history and details of raw material supplies used for the recovery of lead metal. 

This chapter considers the issue of lead production costs for both mines, and smelting/reflning operations. The intention is not to present a detailed analysis of costs, which is anyway beyond the scope of this book, but simply to outline the major cost components and to discuss some of the key factors that influence them. An understanding of the structure of lead production costs provides a useful basis for the later discussion of industry conduct and behaviour. 

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