Aluminum is prized for making products from kitchen foil to Tesla Roadsters. But the silvery metal has a dark side: red mud. Researchers are working to find new uses for the caustic byproduct. ScienceMagArchives
Practical and glamorous, aluminium is prized for making products from kitchen foil and beverage cans to Tesla Roadsters and aircraft. But the silvery metal—abundant, cheap, lightweight, and corrosion resistant—has a dark side: red mud. This brownish red slurry, a caustic mishmash of metal- and silicon-rich oxides, often with a dash of radioactive and rare earth elements, is what's left after aluminum is extracted from ore. And it is piling up.
"There is hope here," says Yiannis Pontikes, a mechanical engineer at KU Leuven. But economic and marketing hurdles remain, and"the clock is ticking" as regulators consider new controls, says Efthymios Balomenos, a metallurgical engineer at the National Technical University of Athens."At some point we will not be able to produce waste. So, there is an urgent need to make changes.
But in 2015, researchers in New Zealand reported that by adding a common cement additive called silica fume to red mud, together with a modest amount of iron, they could create a cement with roughly the same hardness as Portland cement. Pontikes and his colleagues are working to extend these findings, by developing recipes that would enable manufacturers to make cement from a wide range of red muds with varying iron concentrations.
Because of its chemistry, red mud can also capture and lock away carbon dioxide , the major climate warming gas. In Australia, aluminum producer Alcoa bubbles COinto red mud, creating a mild acid that reacts with the alkaline waste, forming carbonate minerals that turn the red mud into red sand that can be used to level road beds. The company estimates that the red mud from a single aluminum refinery can lock up 70,000 tons of COof progress could fade, Balomenos says, just as earlier hopes have.
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