Tungsten Secondary Resource Recycle

China is the largest tungsten producer, exporter and consumer in the world. Its reserve accounts for 58% of the total in the world, and production accounts for 82%. Supply 82% tungsten products to the whole world with 58% of reserve, the sustainable resource becomes a serious problem. 

America and Russia set up tungsten strategic reserve successively. Although America has abundant tungsten resources, it imported tungsten since 1992 instead of exploration of its own resource. Their tungsten secondary resource recycle rate has reached 40% of raw material volume and satisfied most industrial production requirement. Therefore, enhance tungsten secondary resource recycle is urgent and necessary.

The main recycle channel of tungsten is tungsten metal scrap recycle and ore leaching subsidies recycle. Scrap recycle is the main source and subsidies recycle is secondary source.

At present, tungsten metal products recycle is from producing scrap from deep processing, tungsten metal products has advantages of higher tungsten concent than tungsten ore, tungsten content varies from 40% to 95%. After recycle, different process will be applied according to property of scrap, such as maintain the composite of metal, alloy content to directly reuse or transfer it to Na₂WO₄ to produce APT. In the real work, enterprises will choose dealing method flexibly according to the recycle condition. Tungsten metal products has various recycle method, such as crushing method, cold stream method, zinc solvent method, electrolytic method and oxidation method. The less the processing processes, the lower the cost will be.

China is a big producer and consumer of tungsten concentrate, the tungsten subsidy is around 20 thousand tons per annum. Leaching subsidies from concentrate has high tungsten content, as well as Ta, Nb, Sc, Sn, U and Th. Many metallurgy factory has millions tons of leaching subsidies. Recycle leaching tungsten subsidies can not only avoid resource wasting, but also environmental friendly. Recycle of leaching subsidies uses chemical calcination method. Enterprises adopts different recycle methods according chemical components and recycle purpose.

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