Dear Colleagues,

Ionic liquids (ILs) are novel and outstanding solvents that have been proposed for many applications due to their excellent properties, such as negligible vapor pressure, non-flammability, high solvating power, a wide electrochemical window, and tunable properties. Thus, we can find ILs in applications like extractive distillation, the separation and purification of pharmaceuticals, biomass dissolution, reaction media, and catalysis. However, hydrometallurgy could end up being one of the most explored processes because ILs could provide high performance, sustainability, and safety to a mining industry that has various and serious environmental impacts. This may become of even greater importance due to the fact that there is an increasing interest in using hydrometallurgy for the selective recovery of valuable metal ions from electronic wastes or refractory minerals, avoiding, in the latter case, mining tails. Therefore, there is a window of opportunity for ILs in hydrometallurgy. Examples include the use ILs in preferential leaching; the selective solvent extraction of metal ions from pregnant leach liquors; and studies on how the viscosity of these solvents affects the performance of electrowinning despite the large electrochemical window. Thus, these solvents could be used in the entire hydrometallurgical metal recovery process in order to promote a more sustainable mining industry.

Prof. Dr. Esteban Quijada-Maldonado
Prof. Dr. Julio Romero
Guest Editors

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• urban mining
• leaching of refractory minerals
• preferential leaching
• leaching kinetics
• selective solvent extraction
• ionic liquids as diluents
• ionic liquids as extractants
• synergistic extraction
• extraction stoichiometry
• ionic liquids as electrolytes
• effect of viscosity on electrodeposition.