Recycling antimony from

Recycling of antimony provides a large proportion of the domestic supply of antimony. Secondary antimony is obtained from the treatment of antimony-hearing lead and tin scrap such as battery plates, type metal, beating metal, antimonial lead, etc. The scrap are charged iato blast furnaces, reverberatory furnaces, or rotary furnaces, and an impure lead bulHon or lead alloy is produced. Pure lead or antimony is then added to meet the specifications of the desired lead—antimony alloy. 

Bi X, Li Z, Zhuang X, Han Z, Yang W (2011) High levels of antimony in dust from e-waste recycling in southeastern China. Sci Total Environ 409(23) 5126-5128... 

In this process, the liquid butane feed is employed first to recover aluminum chloride and antimony chloride from spent catalyst. This is accomplished in a scrubber, from which insoluble complex is continuously discarded. The butane stream then picks up recycled hydrogen chloride and enters the reactor, where mechanical agitation causes intimate contacting with an equal volume of catalyst. The undesirable complex formed in... 

The raw minerals mined from natural deposits comprise mixtures of different specific minerals. An early step in mineral processing is to use crushing and grinding to free these various minerals from each other. In addition, these same processes may be used to reduce the mineral particle sizes to make them suitable for a subsequent separation process. Non-ferrous metals such as copper, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt, molybdenum, mercury, and antimony are typically produced from mineral ores containing these metals as sulfides (and sometimes as oxides, carbonates, or sulfates) [91,619,620], The respective metal sulfides are usually separated from the raw ores by flotation. Flotation processes are also used to concentrate non-metallic minerals used in other industries, such as calcium fluoride, barium sulfate, sodium and potassium chlorides, sulfur, coal, phosphates, alumina, silicates, and clays [91,619,621], Other examples are listed in Table 10.2, including the recovery of ink in paper recycling (which is discussed in Section 12.5.2), the recovery of bitumen from oil sands (which is discussed further in Section 11.3.2), and the removal of particulates and bacteria in water and wastewater treatment (which is discussed further in Section 9.4). 

Waste from electrical and electronic equipment arises at the sorting plant, where the frame, the printed circuit board PCB, the cathode ray tube, etc. are separated for recycling. The remaining plastics fraction is in part flame-retarded, hence contains brominated and antimony compounds. The number of WEEE recycling plants is growing, so that the logistics are no longer a major problem. 

Some of the antimony produced in the United States is recycled from old lead storage batteries used in cars and trucks. 

FP-4 (zirconium, niobium, molybdenum, technetium, ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, silver, cadmium, indium, tin, antimony)—are only slightly soluble (<1 wt %) in the process alloy, thus will partition between both product streams. The process, as presented, offers no method of FP-4 removal and possibly an unwanted increase in these products would occur if the fuel were to be recycled. However, it would be possible to separate the FP-4 from the plutonium/thorium stream by recovering the plutonium/thorium by hydriding. The FP-4 do not form stable hydrides and would remain in solution. 

To close the recycling loop, the majority of the production from secondary lead producers returns to the battery manufacturer as alloys and soft lead. At present, secondary producers experience no problems in achieving the purity requirements for most automotive battery alloys, particularly those that are antimony-based. The increased purity requirement in VRLA batteries will, however, make the refining stages more critical. 

The fume from the process will contain significant levels of cadmium, arsenic and antimony, and will require an acid leaching process step to reduce the impurity levels to allow recycle of the fume to the Ausmelt furnace. 

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