Lead Operations | metallurgy, lead production / processing, smelter

 metallurgy, lead production / processing, smelter

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The seven major plants in Lead Operations produce lead plus significant quantities of silver, gold, bismuth, copper, and arsenic products. These plants are designed to treat a wide range of feed materials including lead concentrates, residues from the zinc plants and recycled lead batteries.

The new lead smelter - using the KIVCET smelting process developed in Russia - together with a new slag fuming plant were started up in 1997, and has a capacity of 120,000 tonnes of lead metal per year. The KIVCET plant significantly reduced CO2 and SO2 emissions and also drastically cut the emissions of toxic metals into the environment compared with the old plant, whose blast furnace process had been in use for nearly a century.

The first lead-acid battery recycling program in North America was developed here in the early 1980s. Currently, about 20% of the smelter's lead production is from this source.

Since 2006, electronic waste or e-scrap (TVs, monitors, computers etc) from all over Western Canada has been recycled to recover and re-use their contained metals. The 2010 Winter Olympics medals contained some recycled gold, silver and copper from this process.

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