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With the supply restriction from traditional rare earth deposits, alternative sources of rare earth elements (REEs) such as coal are being studied. The United States National Energy Technology Laboratory has identified US coal deposits as a potential source of rare earth elements. Several techniques such as physical separation, flotation, ion-exchange, agglomeration, and leaching are being evaluated for the successful exploitation of these elements from coal and its by-products. A previous study published in the Geoscience BC 2018 mineral report on the characterization of REE in the British Columbian coal samples have shown that a major portion of the rare earth in the run of mine coal reports to the middling and tailing streams. Hence, this study is focused on the extraction of the rare earth from coal tailings. Several studies have shown the use of an alkali-acid leaching process to successfully demineralize various high ash coals to produce a clean coal concentrate since the ash-bearing components such as clay and quartz were removed from the coal during this process. In this study, the alkali-acid leach process was adopted to chemically clean coal tailings as well as to extract rare earth elements. Different process parameters such as sodium hydroxide (NaOH) concentration, temperature, and time were studied. Results showed that it is possible to extract more than 85% of REE with this process and simultaneously produce clean coal from coal tailing.

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Electronic waste is one the fastest growing waste streams in the world, and printed circuit boards (PCBs) are the most valuable fraction of this stream due to the presence of gold, silver, copper, and palladium. Printed circuit boards consist of approximately 30% metals and 70% non-metals. The non-metal fraction (NMF) is composed of 60-65% fiberglass and 35-40% organics, in the form of surface-mount plastics and epoxy resins in the printed circuit board laminates. The organics in the NMF provide a potential alternative source of energy, but hazardous flame retardants contained in epoxy resins and the presence of residual metals create challenges for utilizing this material for energy recovery. This research provides an evaluation of the energy content of printed circuit boards. Density-based separation was used to separate various components of the NMF to increase the energy content in specific density fractions while reducing the metal content. The result showed that the energy content before and after the removal of the metallic fraction from PCBs was 9 and 15 GJ/t, respectively. After the density-based separation of the NMF, the energy content in the lightest fraction increased to 21 GJ/t, while reducing the concentration of the hazardous flame retardants. The contents of the hazardous flame retardants and residual metal were analyzed, to evaluate the harmful effect of emissions produced from utilizing the NMF as an alternative feedstock in waste-to-energy applications.