Gold Mine Tailings: A Potential Source of Silica Sand for Glass Making

Abstract

Mining of minerals such as gold, copper, and platinum has been one of several activities sustaining the economy of South Africa. However, the mining sector has contributed significantly to environmental contamination through the improper disposal of mine tailings which covers vast areas of land. Therefore, this study utilised a vitrification process to manufacture glass from gold mine tailings. X-ray fluorescence was used to determine the chemical composition of the tailings while X-ray diffraction was adopted for the mineralogy. The tailings were of granitic composition enriched in potentially toxic elements such as copper, cadmium, zinc, lead, arsenic, and chromium. A representative sample of gold mine wastes of sandy grain size was used in making the glass. Based on composition, the glass was formulated by adding an average 10.0 mass% of CaCO3 and 5.0 mass% of Na2CO3 to 35.0 mass% of SiO2, which resulted in the production of a green-coloured glass.

Silica from Natural Sources: a Review on the Extraction and Potential Application as a Supporting Photocatalytic Material for Antibacterial Activity

“…Various studies have been conducted using natural materials, such as beach sand and agricultural waste to produce high purity silica extracts. This beach sand has a more dominant silica concentration than other oxides (Ismail et al, 2020;Eddy et al, 2015;Okereafor et al, 2020;Rattanaudom et al, 2020). Several studies have shown the results of high purity silica extraction in di erent sand extraction areas.…”

How to Identify Potentials and Barriers of Raw Materials Recovery from Tailings? Part I: A UNFC-Compliant Screening Approach for Site Selection

“…The rejected minerals are called tailings and they consist of finely ground rocks and chemical additives which are often stored in tailings storage facilities (TSFs) [15]. Tailings can contain residual (non-)metalliferous minerals that can be valorised due to less efficient processing technologies of the past or because the contained minerals were not exploitable but are used as RMs in modern technologies [16][17][18][19][20][21]. Indeed, there are efforts to improve tailingsrelated safety by monitoring or the removal of contaminants for instance [22][23][24].…”

Evaluation of Numidian quartz sandstones from Southern Italy for industrial applications

“…Silica sand represents the major constituent among natural raw materials, required for glass making or in different industrial fields as foundry and ferro-silica alloy, ceramic, fertilizer, abrasive and cement (Okereafor et al, 2020;Osseni et al, 2018;Phani, 2014). Natural deposits derived from both loosely consolidated sands and from crushing weakly cemented sandstones are used.…”