Recovery of Copper from Low Copper Content Waste

摘要

Pyrometallurgical processing has been studied to recover copper from low copper containing wastes such as shredding fluff of automobiles. They are mainly land filled in Japan. Treatment of these kinds of wastes is important not only from the point of resource security but also environmental problems caused by harmful metal elements. In this study, Pyrometallurgical processing has been examined to recover copper from low copper containing waste and as a result, it was possible to produce a 99.9 % copper metal from the waste. The materials are supposed to be wasted from treatment process for final productions such as waste electric appliance, automobile, and various sludge. And these wastes should be treated at preparation process to separate plastics and other materials followed by pyrometallurgical processes. The pyrometallurgical process consists of 2 steps. The first step is copper enrichment by phase separation. In this process the copper contents reached more than 90 % under carbon saturation. The second step is a refining process using a copper oxide base flux such as the Cu_2O-SiO_2-X system. The final copper content reached 99.9 % which can be used for casting materials.