Aquarius Platinum's Kroondal mine in South Africa is thought to be the first pgm-flotation plant in the world to process chrome-mine tailings.

The company has installed a new chromite-tailings retreatment plant to recover pgms at its Kroondal operations, in a move that will add an initial 20,000 ounces to its pgm production.

Aquarius has spent $5 million on the plant, and believes that the returns will far outweigh that expenditure.

The plant also has important environmental effects, because the process is putting to good use material that is normally discarded.

The plant works by taking newly generated tailings piped from the neighbouring Kroondal chrome mine, owned by Xstrata, which makes up 60 per cent of the throughput at the plant.

Then the remaining 40 per cent comes from dump material brought in from various dumps in the area, most belonging to Bayer's Rustenburg chrome operation.

After the dump material is screened, the two feeds are then mixed in a tank before the combined feed goes through four stages of roughing and six stages of cleaning.

Finally, the retreated tailings are pumped to Kroondal's tailings facility.

This development comes following Aquarius's "pool and share" agreement with fellow platinum miner Angloplat at its Kroondal operations.


Ÿ Adfero Ltd