Copper Telluride
An intermediate compound of copper and tellurium recovered from copper anode slime during electrorefining, later refined into pure tellurium or cadmium telluride semiconductor material.
Covered in 1 MetalsCost.com News Intelligence article, most recently on August 25, 2026.
Overview
Copper telluride isn't a product anyone sets out to make on its own — it's a way-station in extracting tellurium, a rare element too scarce to mine directly, from the anode slime left behind when copper is electrorefined. That slime is a rich but messy mixture of the precious and minor metals too noble to dissolve during refining: gold, silver, selenium and tellurium among them. Recovering tellurium from it typically starts with pressure leaching the slime, then adding copper powder to the tellurium-bearing solution, which precipitates the tellurium out as solid cuprous telluride (Cu2Te).
Recovery Process
The cuprous telluride precipitate is itself just an intermediate: refiners further leach and electrolytically process it to strip out the copper and isolate pure elemental tellurium, or, increasingly, react it further to produce cadmium telluride, the semiconductor compound used as the light-absorbing layer in thin-film solar panels. Because tellurium has no ore deposits of its own worth mining, essentially the entire global supply is a byproduct of copper refining.
Sources
- Tellurium recovery process from copper anode slime — Tellurium, from Copper Anode Slime to High Purity Product: A Review Paper (2020)
