Scientific and Production Association “RIVS”, Saint Petersburg, Russia:
I. V. Ukraintsev, Director of Hydrometallurgy Department, I_Ukraintsev@rivs.ru
V. S. Trubilov, Head of Geotechnology Department
A. S. Klepikov, Leading Engineer of Hydrometallurgy Department

Nowadays, exhaustion of copper raw material base is substantiated by the fact that most enterprises use the concentrating technologies, developed as high and medium contents. According to the forecasts, in the nearest time, copper content in ores will be decreased to 0.5%. Russia has a large raw materials base of oxidized, ill-conditioned and off-balance copper-bearing material, concentration tailings and overburden waste (the metal sources). Unfortunately, processing of such raw materials (being cheap and environmentally friendly method of copper obtaining) has not already found the proper application in Russia, but is successfully applied all over the world. Besides the copper source, dumps are the long-term source of salts of non-ferrous and heavy metals in environment with underspoil waters. Solution of this problem is in realization on such objects of technology of heap and dump leaching, intensifying the process of metal removal with productive solutions and their following obtaining as a marketable product. Enlarged technical-economic calculation, realized for the site of dump leaching of copper from the Kalmakyr deposit dumps, showed the economical reasonability of this technology introduction. One of the prospective ways is also the complex approach to copper obtaining from poor, ill-conditioned and technogenic raw materials using concentration and hydrometallurgy methods.

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