Newly generated slag at the Aksu ferroalloys plant in Kazakhstan will be processed into marketable finished products for the country’s metals and construction industries at a facility which will have a production capacity of up to 130,000 t/y of metal concentrate and should process over 4 Mt of waste within five years. The plant belongs to JSC TNC Kazchrome, which is owned by Eurasian Resources Group (ERG), a leading diversified natural resources producer.

Sergey Prokopyev, Director of the Aksu ferroalloys plant, explained that “waste recycling is one of the aspects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution announced by President Nursultan Nazarbayev and one of the megatrends affecting the Group’s operations and therefore we have prioritised this initiative. There will be no overlaps between the new investment project and the functions of the existing slag processing shop at Asku because the operations will be run in parallel. The new slag processing plant (SPP) will further process fines, a niche that our enterprise has not addressed until now.”

The production process at the SPP involves continuous flow separation of slag followed by the recovery of metal concentrate and subsequent fractional separation of tailings. According to engineering specifications, metal recovery will reach at least 85%. The plant design will incorporate a closed-loop water system and internal sludge filtration to help prevent environmental pollution. The new facility in Aksu will create 400 additional jobs.

There are plans to use the recycled waste at Aksu to produce construction mixes, refractory compounds and commercial sand and gravel. The city administration intends to transform the waste recycling cluster that will be established as a result into an industrial park and negotiations are underway with the relevant Kazakhstan government agencies to implement the necessary prerequisites for this initiative.