Ukraine offers tailings dams, waste from mining and metallurgical plants as alternative deposits of critical materials – Ministry of Economy
Ukraine, within the American-Ukrainian Reconstruction Investment Fund, proposes to consider not only classic greenfield deposits for investments in the extraction of critical materials, but also alternative sources of raw materials, including the processing of tailings dams and waste from the mining and metallurgical complex, Deputy Minister of Economy, Environment and Agriculture Yehor Perelyhin reported.
"What was considered ballast for decades is actually a new raw material base: without opening new quarries, we can obtain strategic metals for batteries, electronics, aviation, and the defense industry — and at the same time neutralize the negative historical environmental consequences," Perelyhin, who is a member of the AUIF board of directors, wrote in a column on the Interfax-Ukraine agency website.
He named six potential areas for searching for hidden opportunities. The first point is the tailings dams of mineral sands (titanium sands, monazite), where rutile, ilmenite, zircon remain. "Deep processing and hydrometallurgy can open up opportunities for obtaining zirconium, hafnium and scandium - metals for high-temperature ceramics, aviation, optics," the expert believes.
According to him, the advantage of such an approach is the rapid access to marketable strategic raw materials without new overburden and mining.
Perelyhin added that interesting sources for extracting strategic raw materials can also be sludge accumulators from hydrometallurgy and waste from the production of titanium sponge.
The second direction he identified was "Red Sludge" and slags from production of pigment titanium dioxide (TiO₂), because by-products of alumina and titanium pigment plants contain scandium (as well as titanium, iron, and aluminum).
"Today, there are technologies for integrating Sc₂O₃ extraction modules directly into existing lines - a classic brownfield approach: less capital investment, faster start," the deputy minister noted.
In his opinion, phosphogypsum and phosphate waste are also an interesting direction, because the extraction of rare earth elements here can be combined with production of construction gypsum.
Another potentially attractive option, according to a member of the management board of the American-Ukrainian Investment Fund, is TPP ash and coal dumps, because the ash contains rare earth elements, gallium, scandium, aluminum and germanium.
As a fifth direction, Perelyhin highlighted tailings of iron, copper and nickel ores: cobalt, tellurium, germanium, vanadium, tungsten, and sometimes gold and silver are often "lost" in these flows, while modern extraction and leaching schemes allow these metals to be returned to circulation without creating new quarries.
Finally, he suggests paying attention to waste from uranium mining and processing, because, in addition to the uranium component, these tailings contain vanadium, scandium, molybdenum, selenium, as well as heavy rare earth elements and yttrium (HREE/Y). "This is a strategic basket for alloys, catalysis, electronics - and at the same time an object of priority environmental remediation," the expert emphasized.