Smelter Module: Companion Metals from Gas-Cleaning, Dust-Wash and Refinery Streams

A non-ferrous smelter makes copper, lead or zinc, but every tonne of ore also carries a second set of elements: thallium, indium, bismuth, selenium and tellurium. They leave with the acid water of gas cleaning, with flue-dust wash waters and with refinery effluent, and settle in anode slime. Today the plant precipitates them with sulphides or a coagulant, obtains a hazardous sludge and pays to store it; the metals stay in the sludge. This paper describes the ARBOK Smelter Module, a container-class unit installed directly on the existing wet streams of a smelter or refinery. It applies deep-vacuum phase separation in a single pass: water returns to the process, dissolved salts and metals leave as dry separated fractions for refining, and neither sludge nor discharge remains. The module is the ARBOK Critical-Materials Recovery platform fitted to a smelter and reads the per-metal cases as one site-level package. Keywords: smelter, companion metals, thallium, indium, bismuth, tellurium, selenium, flue dust, anode slime, zero liquid discharge, vacuum phase separation.