South African Miners Losing Out on Cobalt

Mining Weekly reported that according to Dr. RE (Robbie) Robinson, South African mines could recover more cobalt if they used selected blast mining in hard-rock narrow-reef gold and platinum mines.

Robinson said:

If you can selectively separate the reef part of the underground ore reserve and throw the waste rock aside, the cobalt concentration once that ore reaches the surface is very much higher and becomes easier to recover.

If you adopt a zero waste, non-toxic philosophy on waste residues, it’s easy enough to recover all that cobalt, while also recovering uranium and quite a number of other elements that have potential value.

We should be doing this, and it should be started just as soon as we possibly can.

Click here to read the full Mining Weekly report.