Our water efficient technologies
Water efficient solutions
Water management
With the increasing complexity of ores, declining ore grades and the lower quality water resources, water management is becoming more and more important within minerals processing. In minerals processing, high quality may not always be necessary, but the right quality is often a better solution. We have solutions for treating process waters to improve metal recovery in flotation. Sea water and high salinity groundwater can be effective resources with small changes in the processing plant that substantially reduce the pressure on high-quality freshwater resources. Other solutions, such as raw water treatment where cleaned municipal wastewater can be used as the raw water source for mines without compromising recovery, is also something we can offer to our customers.
Tailings disposal and management
Traditional tailings storages pose long-term environmental risks. Metso’s technologies can help de-risk tailings storages by minimizing water usage. Metso Tailings Management Solutions integrate dewatering, safe and sustainable slurry transportation, material handling and reprocessing of existing tailings.
Metso’s tailings filtration portfolio and approach emphasizes dry stacking as an ecologically promising approach, challenging conventional cost assumptions with filtered tailings and stacking. Reprocessing older tailings facilities can yield significant residual mineral production. This approach can transform tailings ponds from liabilities into revenue-generating assets, often more cost-effectively than from processing virgin material.
Metso’ s dewatering technologies, such as paste thickening and filtration, can enhance water recovery from tailings. The same applies to technologies that change the way the ore is processed, such as Metso’s ore sorting and separation processes that reduce the proportion of fine tailings in the mix.
Filtration solutions
High-pressure filtration can reduce water content in tailings, decreasing storage volume and environmental impact. Metso’s larger filters increase material processing capacity and therefore increase overall productivity. Metso’s filtration expertise ensures reliable, efficient systems with minimal downtime and maintenance costs. The thickener and clarifier feed system ensures low flocculant usage, bringing additional environmental and cost efficiencies to customer operations. Water efficiency can also be improved by reducing the amount of waste that is in contact with water. Metso offers a range of technologies to achieve this, such as dry processing alternatives across many elements in plant production facilities.
In 2024, we launched the new version of the Larox® PF 60 series filter that improves safety, process efficiency and dewatering capacity in mining and other process industry applications. Advanced features can reduce water and oil usage by up to 90% and 75%, respectively.
