#I'm sorry if this is really boring and it's not cobalt processing ^^' I'll get to that next. I'm outlining and this is what's been hard. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

iamthepulta · 5 months ago

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The Twelve Principles of Circular Hydrometallurgy, (Binneman & Jones, 2023) are:

The goal is, essentially, that if you have an "ore" of a laptop, you'd be able to 'extract' and separate the gold, cobalt, copper, thallium, zinc, etc by exploiting their physical and chemical properties, with minimal waste products and minimal harm. The process is continuous, and most of the reagents in the vats can be reused, or don't harm the system.

For copper, we separate sulfides from unwanted minerals by exploiting their hydrophobic surface. Then they're converted into a CuSO4 solution that is purified, and then we're able to add electricity to the system to get copper to drop out of solution in a usable form (native copper).

So I think for this essay/location, I'm going to pick Reduce Chemical Diversity, because according to the diagram here, they actually did a pretty good job of only using hydroxide additives? It looks very simple and interesting. I'll also do Use Benign Chemicals because the mill is right next to the Great Lakes and I'm curious if there are problems there. I'll also do Maximize Mass/Energy etc because that's easy fucking fruit. I don't know why that's in this circle. It bugs me.

Preventing Waste is also easy fruit, and combine circular hydrometallurgy with Zero Waste Mining which is an interesting topic, but I hate how the authors of this paper discussed it.

#I have a surprising amount of beef with this paper because the authors were chemists and picked one or two mining hydromet #examples and called it a day with 0 consideration for all the other shit in the ground that we have to consider for mining.#So for Zero Waste Mining what they mean is also extracting the silica and the aluminum and the Fe and the Mg from all the #random minerals that are just in the ground normally. Which is a great idea but really difficult when they're not in high concentrations #So you're essentially saying 'I have a lot of Fe as a side product in my system so I'm going to include 50 Ma worth of equipment to #save a little bit of this iron and pay for the cost to get it where it needs to go when it changes/damages my system overall.'#It's kind of like moon mining. It's a good idea in theory. In practice it's really difficult to design a system that checks that box becaus #all the elements need different solutions/conditions to separate.#I'm sorry if this is really boring and it's not cobalt processing ^^' I'll get to that next. I'm outlining and this is what's been hard.

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