The continually increasing demand for industrially and technologically important metals has once again given focus onto deep-sea resources as a viable metal-source. The deep-sea nodules found in abundance on the sea floor mainly contain the industrially important metal manganese. Additionally, they contain enriched amounts of nickel and copper as well as other valuable extractable metals such as cobalt and molybdenum, whose demand has increased significantly in the past decades. The study of the state-of-the art in PMN processing shows that in most cases a three-metal processing scenario is pursued. In these processes only nickel, copper and cobalt are extracted and produced as marketable products. This is true especially for hydrometallurgical processes. These approaches leave more than two-thirds of the processed deep-sea nodules unused, which would mean an enormous amount of waste to be landfilled and are thus very questionable from an ecological perspective. This makes a pyrometallurgical process with a zero-waste target advantageous, which is developed in the presented research.weiterlesen