Elevated pH on Bioleaching of Nandan Lead-Zinc Tailings as Building Materials

摘要

A series of the experiments were carried out on the Nandan lead-zinc tailings management and one bioleaching method was proposed with the purpose of recovering the valuable metal such as Zn. Firstly, multi-elements analysis was performed to provide theoretical data. Secondly, the effect of the pH on the bacterial growth and Fe~(2+) oxidation was investigated. The results showed that pH at 2.5 was the optimum for the bacteria. The concentration of the bacteria at pH 2.5 can be up to 9.3 ×10~7 cells/mL. Finally, the bioleaching treatment was performed to study the potential of bioleaching the tailings. The data illustrated that the method of bioleaching can extremely recover metals such as zinc from the tailings, which provided novel insights into metal recycling.