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Secondary metal recovery methods from solid waste include pyro

metallurgy (Long et al., 2010), hydrometallurgy (Kumari et al., 2016),
and biological leaching (Yang et al., 2014).
Metal recovery is widely carried out from primary minerals (Brar
et al., 2022), but these primary resources are becoming progressively
exhausted by long-term mining, and the cost and difficulty of mining are
also increasing (Rai et al., 2021)
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In recent years, machine learning (ML) has become increasingly
popular due to its advanced data interpretation capabilities and high
efficiency. Random forests, artificial neural networks, and other ML
algorithms are widely used in solid waste generation (Kannangara et al.,
2018), treatment (Guo et al., 2021), management (Lakhouit et al.,
2023), resource utilization (Guo et al., 2021) modeling, and prediction
(Cheah et al., 2022). Liu et al. (2022) investigated the environmental
risks of heavy metal leaching from 160 incinerated fly ash samples based
on an interpretable ML method.
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Given these limitations, in this study, we proposed a novel strategy to
rapidly and accurately evaluate the metal recovery potential of CFA
without the need for complex experimental investigations.
Dataset 1 contains a total of 500 data points from 10 CFA samples
whose features include four types of physicochemical properties,
elemental properties, total concentration, and fractions, with a total of
50 features. Specifically, the physicochemical properties comprised of
16 feature variables, such as the particle size D10 and D50, oxides SiO2
and CaO, and loss on ignition, while the elemental properties included
32 feature variables, such as the atomic volume (See Table S1 for de
tails).
he water-soluble frac
tion (F1), acid-soluble fraction (F2), reducible fraction (F3), oxidizable
fraction (F4), and residual fraction (F5) (
F1
represents metal elements that can easily be removed using ultrapure
water (Zhang et al., 2017). F2 comprises metal elements bound to car
bonates that can pass into the water column. F3 consists of metal ele
ments bound to iron and manganese oxides, while F4 represents the
metal fraction bound to organic matter and sulfide under oxidizing
conditions (Morillo et al., 2004). F5 includes metal elements that are
associated with crystalline minerals.
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In PSO, each particle in the particle swarm represents a possible
solution to a problem.
(1) Initialize the particle swarm
Set the particle swarm size to T (generally ~20–40), randomly
initialize the velocity and position of each particle in the velocity in
terval and search space,
Gradient boosting decision tree
The gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) method is an ensemble
learning boosting algorithm that only uses decision trees as weak
learners and combines the addition model and forward-step algorithm
for iterative optimization. This algorithm involves three main concepts:
decision tree, gradient boosting, and shrinkage
2) Define the fitness function and solve individual extrema as the
initial fitness value for each particle.
(3) The initial fitness value is taken as the local optimal solution of
each particle and saved as the optimal particle position. These
optimal solutions are then compared to find the global optimal
solution, whose position is recorded (Grobler and Engelbrecht,
2018).
(4) Update the velocity and position of each particle according to
Formulas 1 and 2 (Sousa-Ferreira and Sousa, 2016).
vdd

i = ωvd i + c1r1( pd i − xd i ) + c2r2(pd g − xid)

Therefore, we used the gradient boosting regression algorithm from the
ensemble module of the scikit-learn library to construct the prediction
model (Pedregosa et al., 2011), which benefits from the ease of use and
wide range of functionality of the Python programming language
Particle swarm optimization
Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a probabilistic global optimi
zation algorithm based on bird foraging behavior
both datasets
were initially divided into training and testing sets using a ratio of 9:1.
The size of the testing set was then progressively increased from 10% to
40% at 5% intervals, and the model performance under different split
ratios was evaluated using the default parameters in scikit-learn
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The mobility and fractions of metal elements affect the metal re
covery potential of CFA. Even if metals have the same total concentra
tion but belong to different fractions, their recovery potential will differ
to some extent. On this basis, this study proposed a new index to mea
sure metal recovery potential (MRP), whose formula is as follows:
MRP = ( ∑i=n1 Fi × Ei) × Tc(5)
where n represents the number of metal element fractions from
sequential extraction, Fi is the percentage of the ith fraction, Ei repre
sents the metal recovery potential of the ith fraction, which can be
determined by inspection or expert knowledge, and Tc is the total con
centration of the specific metal element under investigation in CFA
Performance evaluation
Better model performance is
indicated by R and R2 values closer to 1 and smaller MSE and MAE
values. In addition, in terms of significance, P < 0.01 (0.05) was used as
a threshold to indicate a strong correlation between the two variables,
which can also imply high model prediction accuracy.
Feasibility analysis of GBDT-PSO
Repetitions and split ratio
The process of determining the number of the repeated split of data
sets is shown in Fig. 3a. When the number of repetitions was below 10,
the model performance fluctuated significantly.
. As
the number of repetitions increased, the curve fluctuation decreased
gradually, and the R2 values of datasets 1 and 2 varied slightly around
0.778 and 0.772, respectively.
As shown, for dataset 1, the R2 values of the
model for the training and testing sets were 0.759 and 0.795, respec
tively, for a testing set size of 10%
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The PSO algorithm was used for hyper-parameter tuning, with
the optimal values shown in Table 1. The optimization model 1, con
structed from dataset 1, required 2000 weak estimators; this was nearly
eight times the number of estimators required for model 2, which was
constructed from dataset 2. These large differences in the numbers of
required weak evaluators indicate that the learning ability of model 1
was better
Specifically, the R2
and R values of model 1 on the testing set after hyper-parameter tuning
were 0.88 and 0.94, higher than the equivalent values of 0.79 and 0.90
achieved by model 1 before tuning and also higher than the R2 = 0.84
and R = 0.92 values of optimized model 2. In addition, the P values of
the training set and testing set for the optimized model 1 were 3.92 ×
10− 16 and 4.71 × 10− 17, respectively. Both values met the significance
test level of P < 0.01, indicating a significant correlation between the
predicted results and actual values
elemental properties on metal fractions. However, many researchers
have indirectly corroborated our findings by exploring the differences in
the fractions of different metal elements.
fractions were different for different metal
elements. Using the BCR method, the proportion of Cd in water-soluble
and exchangeable fractions was found to be highest with a value of
47.3%, while Cr and Co exhibited high residual fraction proportions
with values of 42.8% and 40%, respectively
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In the DAT sample, the concentrations of Al and Fe were also both
very high, corresponding to values of around 15,096 mg/kg and 16,054
mg/kg, respectively. However, although the overall Fe concentration
was higher, the proportion of Al reached 63.64% in fractions F1–F3,
which exceeded that of Fe (20.17%); hence, the recovery potential of Al
ranked second after that of Ca.
he different chemical fractions determine the mobility of metal
(Kim et al., 2002); in turn, this mobility affects the metal recovery po
tential.
These techniques can also be used to evaluate the
recovery potential of different metals in solid waste based on accessible
fractions (Van Herreweghe et al., 2003).
However, existing experi
mental methods are expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming,
which hinders the study of effective metal extraction from solid waste.
Thus, in this study, we proposed a novel metal recovery potential
evaluation strategy that can yield economic and environmental benefits
and is conducive to sustainable development. Specifically, two
GBDT-PSO models were constructed to predict metal fractions (F1–F5)
based on the sequential extraction method.
The identified metal recovery potential of the DAT sample was the
greatest, with an MRP of 43,311.70, whereas that of the JAP sample was
the lowest, with an MRP of 10,568.25.
An acid leaching test conducted by King et al. (2018)
confirmed that higher Ca concentrations could improve the extraction
efficiency of metal elements; thus, the combination of the above two
factors could explain the greatest metal recovery potential of Ca to some
extent.