“…Zinc is obtained by pyro-or hydrometallurgical methods, involving preliminary enrichment (Sousa et al, 2017;Mütevellioğlu and Yekeler, 2019;Jian et al, 2019;Onukwuli and Nnanwube, 2022;Omarova et al, 2022). When enriching lead-zinc sulfide ores, only up to one tenth of the ore passes into a concentrate (Turkebaev and Sadykov, 1988;Shevko et al, 2021a). The rest (most) is stored in dumps, is used to fill the worked-out area (Feigl et al, 2010;Behera et al, 2020;Akkaya et al, 2021) or, at best, is used in the construction industry (for example, as an aggregate in concrete (Evdokimov et al, 2016;Peng et al, 2021;Onukwuli and Nnanwube, 2022;Ibrahim and Atmaca, 2022), the production of silicate and ceramic wall materials (Liu et al, 2019;Zhou et al, 2021;Zou et al, 2022), cement and concrete (Liang et al, 2017;Saedi et al, 2022)).…”