The paper also discusses the possibility of waste valorization schemes to guarantee a more sustainable life cycle for antimony. This paper gives a critical overview of the existing attempts to recover antimony from secondary sources. There is a clear need to move to a more circular economy, where waste is considered as a resource and zero-waste valorization schemes become the norm, especially for rare elements such as antimony. Most of these residues are currently discarded or stockpiled, causing environmental concerns.
Valuable residues are obtained by processing of gold, copper, and lead ores with high contents of antimony. This has sparked efforts to find secondary sources of antimony either through the recycling of end-of-life products or by recovering antimony from industrial process residues. In 2014, the European Commission highlighted antimony in its critical raw materials report, as the element with the largest expected supply–demand gap over the period 2015–2020. The industrial importance of antimony is mainly derived from its use as flame retardant in plastics, coatings, and electronics, but also as decolourizing agent in glass, alloys in lead-acid batteries, and catalysts for the production of PET polymers. Antimony is produced from stibnite ore (Sb 2O 3) which is processed into antimony metal and antimony oxide (Sb 2O 3). Antimony has become an increasingly critical element in recent years, due to a surge in industrial demand and the Chinese domination of primary production.
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