roastbeast3000,
Are you searching how mining company's deal with waste, the hobbyist, or the professional refinery, there may be some similarity in these treatments, as well as your local drinking water treatment plants, and then there can also be different steps or methods used.
To learn how I treat my waste you can read the safety section and dealing with waste, of course I am a small time hobbyist, the larger company although treat theirs similar, they may use other equipment and slightly different processes.
You state in your profile you are an environmental technician, and you state you are doing a school project on recovery or treatment of waste, but then you mention only one gold refining process that not many would use,You said you read Hokes book which was written a very long time ago, it does not sound like you have a basic understanding of chemistry, or the treatment of waste, or of recovery and refining of metals, which one would need to understand how the processes work, these are questions that would be hard to answer, you question was too general, too wide of an area to give you a direct answer.
Tell us who you are and what you are looking for in particular in your School project, and maybe we can help you better. as we have several processes to treat waste depending on what they are, some may be dealt with in different ways, I do not know we can give you a flow sheet of all of the different methods used, but we can give you some tips and places to study some of the methods we use to treat waste, or turn them into useful byproducts.
I cannot tell you how the large company treat theirs, but I can tell you how I treat mine or reuse many of them.
