Leaching

Look up leaching in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

In general, leaching is the extraction of certain materials from a carrier into a liquid (usually, but not always a solvent). Specifically, it may refer to:

• Leaching (agriculture), the loss of water-soluble plant nutrients from the soil; or applying a small amount of excess irrigation to avoid soil salinity
• Leaching (chemistry), the process of extracting minerals from a solid by dissolving them in a liquid
• Leaching (metallurgy), a widely used extractive metallurgy technique which converts metals into soluble salts in aqueous media
  • Dump leaching, an industrial process to extract metals from ore taken directly from the mine and stacked on the leach pad without crushing
  • Heap leaching, an industrial process to extract metals from ore which has been crushed into small chunks
  • Tank leaching, a hydro metallurgical method of extracting valuable material from ore
  • In-situ leaching, a process of recovering minerals such as copper and uranium through boreholes drilled into the deposit
• Leaching (pedology), the loss of mineral and organic solutes due to percolation from soil
• Bioleaching, the extraction of specific metals from their ores through the use of bacteria and fungi

• In cooking, leaching generally refers to Parboiling.

See also

• Leachate, the liquid that drains or 'leaches' from a landfill
• Leach (disambiguation)
• Leech (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.