Bikita Minerals is recovering about 300 kilogrammes of tantalite concentrate a day from tailings, extracting additional value from material left behind during earlier processing as the lithium producer seeks to recover more minerals from its existing resources, Mining Zimbabwe can report.
By Ryan Chigoche
The operation forms part of an integrated beneficiation strategy that targets minerals beyond the mine’s primary products, including spodumene and pollucite, a cesium-bearing mineral, which remain in dumps after previous processing.
Speaking to Mining Zimbabwe on the sidelines of the recently concluded lithium media tour organised by the Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe (MMCZ) in partnership with the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Organisation (ZELO), Bikita Minerals Assistant General Manager Engineer Thomas Mufumi said the company was using different processing methods to recover minerals that could otherwise be lost during beneficiation.
“Currently we are producing around 300 kg a day of tantalite concentrate,” Mufumi said.
The recovery process builds on earlier operations that extracted petalite from the material, leaving remnants of other minerals that can be recovered through additional processing. Rather than treating the remaining material as waste, Bikita is using separate beneficiation stages to capture minerals according to their physical and chemical properties.
“The minute you recover one of the minerals, you are also losing the other mineral,” Mufumi said. “So you have to sustainably develop systems to recover all those different minerals, which are of economic value.”
The company operates two processing plants, one handling ore directly from the mine and another targeting material from dumps. The latter provides an opportunity to recover minerals left behind after previous processing, although doing so requires additional equipment and specialised recovery circuits.
Petalite, for example, can be separated using differences in mineral density, while spodumene requires flotation to exploit its distinct processing properties. Sending all the minerals through a single milling and flotation circuit could result in petalite being lost to the tailings, Mufumi explained.
“The best way as of now to optimally recover these is to identify the different physical properties of those minerals and create an integrated system,” he said. “If you miss this mineral, you are going to use the other technology to recover it.”
The approach builds on Bikita’s wider investment in mineral recovery, including a specialised cesium flotation circuit designed to recover pollucite from historical dumps and plans for a dedicated tantalite-niobium recovery plant. These developments reflect a broader push to extract more value from Zimbabwe’s mineral resources through domestic processing.
Mufumi said the volumes recovered from tailings were lower than those from primary mining, but establishing additional processing circuits still required significant investment.
The company is also seeking to increase output, with Mufumi referring to production exceeding 400 tonnes next year. The period covered by that projection and the precise production measure require clarification.
The economic value of the recovery programme will depend on the quantity and grade of concentrate produced, processing costs and market demand. Bikita did not disclose the expected revenue from the tailings operation or the estimated quantities of spodumene and pollucite remaining in its dumps.
By recovering minerals from material already mined and processed, Bikita is pursuing additional product streams from its existing resources, reducing the extent to which potentially valuable minerals are lost during the beneficiation process.
