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Mining activities are inevitable for the growing industrialization and urbanization in the world. Disposal of mine tailings creates a severe impact to the environment and ultimately to the society. Identifying the applications of mine tailings as potential secondary raw materials would help the mining industries in achieving circular economy. Alkali activation of tailings for their utilization as building materials or backfill in mining sites is one such popular technique. In this paper, mechanically treated silicate tailings rich in magnesium/aluminum content were chosen, to be used as aluminosilicate precursors. The effect of different alkaline sources was accessed by using sodium silicate (Na2SiO3), sodium sulphate (Na2SO4) and sodium carbonate (Na2CO3) as activators. Alkali activated tailings pastes were studied by examining the compressive strength and microstructural properties. High magnesium tailings show good strength results with sodium silicate activator whereas sulphate-based activator performed well in high alumina tailings. Sodium carbonate seems to be efficient in early phases but does not display improvement in later ages. This behavior of alkali activated tailings with different alkali sources were tried to be correlated with the mineralogy of the tailings and its reactivity using FTIR, XRD and TGA.
Perumal et al. (Wed,) studied this question.