Strategies to Secure Critical Minerals by Reprocessing Mine Wastes

Abstract

Securing critical minerals in high demand for clean energy, electric vehicles, and aerospace has emerged as a major concern for countries worldwide due to their scarcity, supply risk, and lack of substitutes. The United States, the EU, Australia, Canada, and Japan have been cooperating to secure these minerals. Critical minerals are most often treated as by-products of metallurgical processes because of their low concentration in the crust of minable depth and high companionability to the major minerals. Feasibility studies for recovering critical minerals from mine wastes have been conducted in the EU and the United States, and some have resulted in commercial production. In Korea, tailings have been investigated to identify their environmental impact, mostly focusing on the behavior of heavy metals in them. In this review, we examine the trends of reprocessing tailings for recovering critical minerals and present the necessary information evaluating tailings as resources. To successfully assess the potential of tailings as resources, it is essential to build a database including the physical, chemical, and mineralogical properties of tailings as well as basic information such as geographic location and accessibility.