Research progress on hazardous chromite ore processing residue treatment and utilization: a critical review

Abstract

Chromite ore processing residue (COPR), which is created during the chromite preparation process of chromite compounds, is considered hazardous waste because it contains chromium trivalent and chromium hexavalent. Recently, the harmless disposal of COPR has received a lot of research interest. COPR is a type of resource attributable to its abundant content of chromium, iron, aluminum, etc. This article starts from the main sources, properties, and pollution characteristics of COPR. It summarizes the methods and approaches used by scholars in recent years to handle COPR: chemical reduction, dry detoxification, pyrolysis, mineralization, solidification/stabilization, biotechnology, electrochemical methods, and resource utilization, achieving harmless treatment of COPR. Among them, research on resource utilization stands out, not only improving resource utilization efficiency but also reducing environmental pollution. This provides new ideas and directions for our future treatment of COPR.

Keywords:

• Chromite ore processing residue
• harmless disposal
• recovery of resources

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Jie Chen, Xingan Zhang, Chao Tan, Mingzhu Zhou, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

All authors certify that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the “Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing, China” (CSTB2022NSCQ-MSX0418), the “Science and Technology Research Program of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission” (KJQN202101132, KJQN202201118), the “Postgraduate Innovation Project of Chongqing University of Technology” (clgycx 20202054 and gzlcx 20223141).