Studies on Briquetting of Chromite Ore with Waste Plastic Binder

This work focuses on the development of new binders with the help of waste plastics for briquetting of ore fines and to measure its cold compressive strength (CCS). Chromite is an important mineral, during the mining operation lot of fines are produced which cannot be easily used by existing technology because most of the technology are cost intensive. Briquetting is considered a cheap and easy method but it needs suitable binder. Plastic is usually synthetic and non-biodegradable material. Now a days a large quantity of plastic is being generated as a waste, utilization of these wastes are very difficult to carry out. One of the best use of these plastic waste is to develop as a binders for ore fines briquetting. In the present study common synthetic waste material i.e., different types of plastic, viz., Polyethylene (P.E.), Poly Vinyl Chloride (PVC) and Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) is used as binder with molasses and lime. Briquettes were prepared and cold compressive strength (CCS) of these briquettes was estimated. From the current study it was observed that the among the new binders waste plastic i.e., PE seems to be very promising for the briquetting of chromites ore.