Tungsten in the smelting production process will produce ammonium paratungstate waste, tungsten oxide waste, and tungsten powder, tungsten carbide and tungsten carbide scrap and other substandard products.

Wolframite mainly adopts the classical process, extraction and ion exchange process for smelting. Because of the use of sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid in these processes, the chemical properties of sodium and chloride ions are active, the precipitation can not be separated by economic and effective methods. It is difficult to open the process in the process and will produce acid and alkali waste liquid and pollute the environment.

In practical applications, it was found that Na₂WO₄ solution could remove more than 90% of phosphorus by ion exchange without phosphorus removal by calcium salt, and the phosphorus concentration in the ammonium tungstate solution was also about 0-3 g/l. Therefore, calcium phosphorus removal has no substantial effect on phosphorus removal, and the process can be eliminated directly. In addition, the calcium salt removal process has many drawbacks, the content of phosphorus slag in WO₃ up to 30%, production must be returned to the boiler alkali recycling, which consumes a lot of raw materials, production costs increased significantly.

Preparation of tungstic acid products in two ways: First, wolframite as the raw material of the classic process; second is scheelite as the raw material of acid production process. Wolframite classic raw material for the process specific process: milling → alkaline boil → purification → scheelite → acidification → dehydration drying → packaging.

With the awareness of the scarcity of resources has been widely recognized, to carry out comprehensive recycling of resources has become a consensus, therefore, the vast majority of tungsten smelting and processing enterprises have paid attention to the comprehensive recycling of resources and the gradual implementation of circular economy mode. For tungsten smelting processing enterprises, the control of effluent pollution treatment, and increase the total recycle of tungsten smelting enterprises is the focus of work.

CaWO₄ is generally affirmative scheelite crystal, a plate or crystal, there are dense, brittle, hardness is 5 ~ 5.5, density of 5.8 ~ 6.2g / cm³, no magnetism. Most of the scheelite deposit in China is a skarn type, with a fine granularity, often associated with or symbiotic with a variety of nonferrous metals such as molybdenum and bismuth, at the same time, there are calcium-bearing gangue similar to the flotation of tungsten ore, so flotation is an effective method to recover fine and even fine-grained scheelite.

With the technological progress of the electric light source and the renewal of the lighting products, the gas discharge lamp has been used more and more widely. Gas discharge lamp electrodes are mostly made of tungsten rods and tungsten wire, these materials include thorium tungsten, doped tungsten, lanthanum tungsten, barium tungsten, rare earth tungsten, pure tungsten, etc., among them, the purity of doped tungsten and pure tungsten is higher, and the content of tungsten can reach 99.95% (3N5) and 99.9999% (4N). 

Ultrafine cemented carbide is a tool material developed in recent years, mainly based on ultra-fine WC powder and adding appropriate binder (such as Co) and grain growth inhibitor to produce high hardness, high wear resistance and high toughness cemented carbide materials. Its performance is higher than that of conventional cemented carbide. It has shown more and more extensive application prospects in difficult-to-process metal material tools, miniature drill bits in the electronics industry, precision molds, and dental drills.

In China, NaOH⁺ phosphate is generally used to decompose scheelite or wolframite in tungsten smelting. Although the subsequent ion exchange process can remove most of the phosphorus, if the decomposition of sodium tungstate solution contains too much residual phosphorus, the concentration of phosphorus in ammonium tungstate solution obtained by ion exchange desorption is often higher than that of technical requirements, resulting in excessive phosphorus in ammonium paratungstate (APT).

Beneficiation wastewater reuse refers to the tailings water concentration plant to reach production after repeated use of the standard, it is an important index of the requirements of environmental protection in mineral processing plant. At present, most of the ore mines have a large amount of waste water and require a large amount of cost treatment. At the same time, there is also a shortage of water resources. Therefore, more and more concentrator plants are being used for wastewater reuse, but the effect obtained is not obvious.