Efficient Recovery of Iron and Chromium from Laterite Residue for Fe–Cr Alloy Production via Sawdust Reduction

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in nickel hydrometallurgy, largely driven by increasing nickel demands from the expanding new energy and stainless steel industries. However, the hydrometallurgical process generates a large amount of laterite residue, which contains valuable metals such as iron and chromium. Currently, laterite residue is often landfilled or deep‐sea dumped due to high treatment costs, causing both ecological damage and resource waste. This study presents a biomass‐based ironmaking process for efficient Fe and Cr recovery from laterite residue. As a biomass resource, sawdust offers cost‐effective, abundant availability and strong iron oxide reduction capability. The phase composition and microstructure of the products are characterized to investigate the phase transformation behavior during the reduction process. The optimal reduction conditions are a 0.85:1 sawdust‐to‐laterite residue mass ratio at 1500 °C for 80 min. Experimental results show that under the optimal conditions, the iron and chromium content in the product reaches 96.71% and 2.63%, respectively, with recovery of 95.80% for iron and 95.29% for chromium.