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07/25/2007 -
Resource Recovery & Recycling from Metallurgical Wastes (2006)
by S. Ramachandra Rao
ISBN 0-08-045131-4. Elsevier, Oxford, U.K. 2006. Hardcover. 580 pages. $150.00.
This book is part of a series on Waste Management published by Elsevier. Waste management involves waste reduction, reuse, recycling, and resource recovery. As the title of the book suggests, this book focuses on recycling and resource recovery. Anyone reading the popular business magazines is well aware of the fact that saving the global environment has come into sharp focus lately. What is interesting is that the world is finally awakening to the fact that this is not just a “do good” activity, but can be a profitable venture. While only the first chapter briefly touches on the business value of these activities, the book is a timely engineering addition with regards to the metallurgical industry waste. The book could easily serve as a textbook for undergraduates and a source book for professionals in the metallurgical process industry. The subject of resource recovery and recycling is presented with technical details of chemistry, description of processes, and comments on the environmental impact.
After the introductory chapter, the second chapter focuses on techniques of waste characterization. Here techniques pertaining to chemical composition as well as the mineralogical nature of the material are discussed. This is important because it enables decision making with regard to techniques likely to be most efficient for the separation of economically useful metals and compounds. The next four chapters of the book describe the principles of various techniques and processes used in recycling and resource recovery. Physical and physico-chemical processes, hydrometallurgical processes, biotechnological processes, and pyrometallurgical processes are discussed in these chapters. One or more of these methods may be utilized to separate out the various elements or compounds of a waste stream.
The next five chapters discuss the subject under specific topics, each focusing on recycling and resource recovery from a specific class of metallurgical waste. It is disappointing that a very short discussion is presented for electronic scrap—which is probably one of the largest and most talked about waste stream in the modern world. Even more disappointing is the fact that the three references quoted in the discussion go back in time to 1976, 1980, and 1991. Certainly there has been more up-to-date work on this important topic.
The last chapter discusses emerging new technologies. Some of these have grown out of a desire to improve process efficiencies, but more importantly, to recover resources from dilute effluents where the concentration of desired compounds is below the limit recoverable by conventional techniques. These have also become important in situations where tighter regulations require a cleaner effluent discharge into the environment. While a lot of the techniques discussed are yet to be adopted commercially, they represent potential for commercialization under unique requirements. For example, magnetic resins have been discussed briefly in this chapter. They have been used with effluents containing toxic metals such as copper and arsenic and have been shown to rapidly remove up to 80% arsenic and 60% copper.
The broad nature of the topic covered by the author almost dictates that coverage of individual topics be limited in scope. Even with that limitation, the book is well written and the publication is of high quality.
For more on Resource Recovery and Recycling from Metallurgical Wastes, visit the Elsevier web site.
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