The road towards sustainable development and building the circular economy has provided a great opportunity to transform the very essence of mining. Human activities, such as product manufacturing, ore extraction, chemical and metallurgical processing, construction, agriculture and others, have relocated and accumulated metal resources from geological origins to the technosphere. The technosphere is defined broadly as a material stockpile that has been established by human activity and technological processes. This material accumulation or technospheric stocks may include urban solid wastes, industrial process residues, mine tailings, municipal solid wastes, landfill and metallurgical slags. The extraction and recovery of metals and mineral resources from these stocks refer to technospheric mining, in contrast to conventional mining, which targets primary ores (Johansson et al., 2013). This increasingly important and significantly relevant new concept, which is geared towards waste valorisation, was introduced in the papers published by Johansson et al. (2013) and Krook and Baas (2013) and covers various areas, including slag, tailings and landfill mining among others.
CITATION: Alorro, R D, Ibana, D, Jones, S A, Ichlas, Z T, Lim, B, Kurniawan, M R and Lee, G G, 2019. Technospheric mining of critical and strategic metals from metallurgical by-products, in Proceedings Future Mining 2019, pp 157159 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).