ABSTRACT
Scientific discoveries have taken advantage of the unique chemical and physical properties of metals to enable creation of a myriad of high-tech products that have transformed twenty-first-century society. However, due to the finite primary supply of precious metals, their burgeoning consumption by consumers and industry is unsustainable without efficient recycling. Vastly improved value recovery from end-of-life metal products is needed, both by increasing the rate of metal recycling and by improving the performance of recycling technologies. Considerable efforts are therefore being made to develop an integrated approach to metallurgical processing of urban-mined resources. This chapter introduces industrial-scale state-of-the-art integrated routes for efficient recovery/recycling of precious metals from various urban mines. Several integrated industrial processes are described in detail as case studies, accompanied by systematic schematics and/or process flow sheets.
