Red Mud Remediation Process Turns Red Mud into Environmentally Benign and Cost Effective Byproduct

Aluminum Oxide production plants around the world are learning about the new green, ecologically-sound process developed by Red Mud Remediation (RMR) that converts Red Mud into an inert and dry residue that can be repurposed for various products. RMR is a worldwide organization that concentrates on research and development of processes that neutralize and reuse the toxic Red Mud byproduct from aluminum oxide production.

Red Mud--a highly toxic mix of solid and metallic oxide-bearing impurities resulting from the extraction/refinement process of Alumina--presents one of the aluminum industry's most important disposal problems. With an expected annual demand of 124 million metric tons of alumina by the year 2017, the highly toxic Red Mud and resistance to new refinement techniques by a number of the world's countries presents an ever growing ecological problem. Fortunately, new cost effective processes are being developed to counteract the damages caused by Red Mud with many producers taking great interest in the patented process developed by Red Mud Remediation. "After six years of working on the problem, our scientists have found a way to develop a clean, affordable and renewable material from Red Mud, and the world's producers are taking notice," said an RMR spokesperson.

Today, alumina producers utilize a number of accepted but often flawed processes for neutralizing Red Mud to lower its environmental impact and possible introduction of metal in soil and groundwater. The objective of most of these activities is to reduce the PH of the resulting waste stream in an attempt to avoid regulation as a hazardous waste product and thereby limit the liability to the company. While there are a number of dry stacking techniques that keep Red Mud from being classified as a hazardous material, they all are very expensive, require large landfills and are not benign chemically.

As a leader in the remediation industry, RMR has developed a new proprietary solution that is quite different from other approaches in that it first removes the need for a large footprint waste storage area with its attendant risks. Secondly, their technique processes the waste stream utilizing an economical patented drying process which does not require natural evaporation to remove the liquids. And most importantly, the RMR solution develops products out of the resulting waste stream and reuses the materials leaving no residual materials on the manufacturing site and no liability for the company.

To make this technology available to their customers, RMR is developing modular batch processing plants to remediate existing Red Mud storage areas as well as In-Situ process plants for integration into new or existing facilities. An economical multi-tiered approach to validating their technology enables companies to ensure that their specific Red Mud variant can be properly disposed of using this process.