Many useful metals unearthed from U.S. mines are discarded.
When mining operations dig for valuable metals, they often exhume ore containing other metals too. These by-product elements are usually treated as waste, but recovering even small fractions could offset the need to import them, researchers report August 21 in Science. For instance, recovering just 1 percent of rare earth elements from this material could replace imports.
“We’re used to skimming cream off the top,” says Elizabeth Holley, a mining geologist from the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. “We need to be better at recovering more from what we’re using.”
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