Improvement mineral dressing and extraction processes of gold-silver ores from San Pedro Frio Mining District, Colombia

The San Pedro Frio district mining, Colombia, is a rich region producing gold-silver ores. Nowadays, the extraction processes used are amalgamation, percolation cyanidation and precipitation with zinc wood. Due to the ignorance of the ore characteristics, gold and silver treatment processes are inadequate and not efficient In addition the inappropriate use of mercury and cyanide cause environmental contamination. In this research the ore characterization was carried out obtaining fundamental parameters for the technical selection of more efficient gold and silver extraction processes. Experimental work was addressed to the study of both processes the agitation cyanidation and the adsorption on activated carbon in pulp. As a final result proposed a flowsheet to improve the precious metals recovery and reduce the environment contamination.