Boron recovery from salt lake brine, seawater, and wastewater – A review

Abstract

Boron compounds are widely used in more than 300 different industries, including glass, ceramics, and energy. The world’s boron consumption increases gradually, but the world's boron reserves are limited to about 1.2 billion tons, and only a few boron minerals are commercially valuable. As a result, the price of boron compounds continues to increase. In order to satisfy the increasing demand for boron, it is very important to recover boron from various boron-containing solutions. Several metal ions, such as magnesium or lithium, usually coexist in the boron solution; therefore, a series of hydrometallurgical treatments is required to separate boron from them. Numerous studies have been conducted to separate boron from boron-containing aqueous solutions; however, there are only a few reviews on the boron recovery. In this paper, we have discussed the processes and their prospects, including precipitation, adsorption, ion exchange, solvent extraction, bipolar membrane electrodialysis, and other methods, for recovering boron from boron-containing solutions (salt lake, seawater, and wastewater). While boron adsorption using porous magnetic hybrids is the most economical method, bipolar membrane electrodialysis is expected to become a powerful method for the simultaneous separation of boron and lithium due to its higher quality, higher recovery, and environmental advantages.