Recovery of rare earth elements (REE) and platinum group metals from tailings and production residues

Slags resulting from the pyrometallurgical processing of automotive catalytic converters often contain a variety of strategic metals such as rare earth elements (REE, especially cerium). Furthermore they contain small amounts of platinum group metals that were not extracted into the collective metal phase. Comparatively high fractions of lanthanum oxide can be found in wastes from the production of spectacle lenses, so called flint glass. These valuable and to some extent critical elements have not been recovered so far, because an adequate processing route from crushing over recovery to the reuse was missing. With our researches in this project, we are striving for a scientific basis, which aims at a closed material cycle of the above mentioned elements.