Method for agglomeration of iron bearing materials

Abstract

A method for compaction of iron bearing materials includes the steps of accumulating iron and steel plant waste materials, including iron bearing fines, hazardous mill waste products, fines, turnings, borings, sludge, dust, mill scale, and the like; and agglomerating such materials by ram briquetting in a ram briquetter. In order to recover valuable non-ferrous constituent metals, the agglomerated material is charged to a smelter; the non-ferrous metals volatilized and removed with the smelter off-gases; the dust is recovered from the smelter off-gases; the recovered dust agglomerated by ram briquetting to form a cold compact material which is charged again into the smelter to volatilize the non-ferrous metals contained therein; the volatilized non-ferrous metal is again recovered as dust; the percentage of each non-ferrous metal in the recovered dust is determined; and when the percentage of dust is sufficiently high that at least one component is economically recoverable, the dust is removed from the process as a high value agglomerate for separate recovery of the non-ferrous metals contained therein.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.