Sustainable Mineral Processing
We focus on the processing of secondary raw materials such as excavated soil, demolition debris, construction waste, track ballast, etc.; but also on "waste" from the processing of primary raw materials that has so far hardly been used, the so-called tailings or waste rock.
All these materials have in common that no meaningful and high-quality use could be found.
Generally, these are sludge ponds, pre-screening material, tailings and landfills with materials for which no profitable use was found, where the valuable material content was too low or technically impossible or could only be recovered with great effort. In some cases it was and is also more economical to deposit these tailings or accompanying minerals in a waste dump. In many places, the technical possibilities were not available in the past decades to process these materials into profitable products.
Most of the natural resources are already exhausted
At the same time, however, we are talking about a shortage of essential raw materials for the building materials industry, due to the fact that there are fewer and fewer permits for new deposit development and mineralogical extraction, and because the natural resources in some regions are already exhausted.
The solution is at hand
You have to reprocess “waste” in such a way that it can be used for a higher value application. However, this also means that the use of excavated material as backfill material does not represent a higher value application. Excavated material must be processed in such a way that an aggregate or sand can be obtained from it, which can then be for example in the concrete industry or in road construction.
Special knowledge and a lot of experience are required for the task of complex raw material processing
The business model or recycling can only be successful if the processing plants also work efficiently. The primary consideration here is whether the system is actually capable of producing high-quality products of constant quality and quantity from the input material. In the long terms other points are extremely relevant too, such as how much maintenance is required, how high is the energy consumption, how labor-intensive is the system, can the system be adjusted to varying materials, etc.