Investigating the effectiveness of using natural zeolite to extract copper, silver and iron in pre-gold leaching:

Abstract

Gold production around the world readily doubled as a consequence of cyanidation’s initial application within the mining industry. Gold in Busia exists both in quartz vein- hosted and Banded Iron Formation-hosted gold deposits and is associated with minerals such as pyrite, magnetite, ilmenite, galena, pyrrhotite, chalcopyrite, covellite and rutile in the following proportions; pyrrhotite (0 – 0.47 wt.% Au), galena (0 –0.52 wt.% Au) Chalcopyrite (0 – 0.04 wt.% Au), pyrite (0 – 0.57 wt.% Au). At this current trend of cyanidation in gold processing, cyanide is expensive to access, highly poisonous in nature hence use of it in plenty is costly economically and unfriendly to the environment. Application of natural zeolite to extract copper and iron prior to leaching, makes cyanide applied only go for gold dissolution. This increases gold recovery lowering the amount of cyanide wasted on the reaction with heavy metals of iron, copper hence reducing the challenge of environmental pollution due to cyanide poisoning. Zeolite is fronted as the best alternative because of its ion-exchange and sorption properties for heavy metals and capabilities of being. thermally regenerated. The research was conducted empirically carried out and it revealed that; An increase in natural zeolite mass resulted in an increase in the value of the ph. of the ore sample however all the masses yielded a p.H increase, the high adsorption capacities that characterize Iron removal from solution by natural zeolite may be due to ion exchange, the Copper removal efficiencies of Natural Zeolite at all adsorbent masses and at all contact times were above 93.103%. KEY WORDS: Gold, Silver copper, Iron, Cyanidation, Gold ore, Adsorbent dose, Contact time, X-ray, Fluorescence