Mineral processing of mine and quarry waste

The Mineralogy and Petrology Group of the British Geological Survey has been involved in a number of waste processing investigations over the last seven years. Four of which are described in this paper. The first, ceramic-grade feldspar was produced by the use of air classification to upgrade the fines resulting from the hand sorting of a pegmatitic-feldspar in Thailand. This is followed by two studies in which combined magnetic separation and froth flotation was used to produce glass- and ceramic-grade feldspar from quarry and mine waste. In the final case, gravity separation was used to remove a significant proportion of the heavy metal bearing minerals from tailings of the former Pb-Zn mining area of Leadhills in Southern Scotland. The aim of this study was to determine the potential for traditional mineral processing technology to recover metal from waste for environmental remediation.