General introduction | 13 presenting a grievous future, while the baseline and moderate scenarios offer a sobering but more promising outlook. However, the milder scenarios are contingent on increasing material recycling and optimizing metal recovery rates. This chapter focuses on the recovery of metals through hydrometallurgical operations, aiming to provide a general understanding of these processes and identifying opportunities for improving the metal recovery process, with a specific focus on sulfur reduction for metal recovery, the state-of-the-art, and current limitations.
The metal recovery process and the tailing problematicThree metallurgical processes are used in the extractive metallurgy process: a. Pyrometallurgy is a method of extracting metals from their ores by using high temperatures, typically in a furnace, to release the metal 29 . The metal can then be recovered from the solid residue or the gases produced during the process. The main steps of pyrometallurgy include drying, briquetting, roasting, smelting, and refining 16 .SRB to grow in a large variety of electron donors and aerotolerant characteristics makes SRB ubiquitous in the environment, even in conditions where SO 4 2is depleted 102 .
Elemental sulfur (S 0 ) reductionThe second dissimilatory microbial sulfur metabolism microorganisms use to obtain energy is the reduction of S 0 . In the S 0 reduction metabolism, two electrons are consumed for the reduction of S 0 into H 2 S (eq. 1.7), a four-fold reduction in the electron donor consumption compared to SO 4 2-. In this metabolic pathway, no activation energy