Abstract:The residue produced from zinc sulfide leaching process often contains abundantly valuable elements, and it is an important secondary resource. However, its enrichment and recovery are still low economic and efficient in industry practice due to its extremely complex properties and structures. Deep insight on technological mineralogy of residue potentially provides an important theoretical basics for the efficient recovery technology development of residue. In this work, the occurrence features of valuable elements in a leaching residue from a large-scale zinc metallurgy plant in Inner Mongolia were determined. The results show that the residue contains 44.33% sulfur, 2.65% lead, 4.24% zinc and 192 g/t silver, mainly occurring in the forms of element sulfur, sphalerite and anglesite, in which the silver may mainly borne in the lead minerals. Approximately 20% soluble zinc and iron sulfate, and a small amount of chalcopyrite and pyrite were found in the residue. The leaching residue particles are ultra-fine size and disappears obvious structure and configuration. Most amount of lead, zinc and copper minerals are mainly associated with sulfur in the forms of adjacent and wrapped intergrowths with -10μm particle size in the residue. It should be noted that the distribution of silver in -10μm fraction is reached as high as 86.47%, which is the key factor affecting subsequent separation performance.