Cobalt Reduction

Cobalt is a chemical element with symbol Co and atomic number 27. Like nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth’s crust only in chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal.
Cobalt-based blue pigments (cobalt blue) have been used since ancient times for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass, but the color was later thought by alchemists to be due to the known metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name kobold ore (German for goblin ore) for some of the blue-pigment producing minerals; they were so named because they were poor in known metals, and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes upon smelting. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), and this was ultimately named for the kobold.
Today, some cobalt is produced specifically from various metallic-lustered ores, for example cobaltite (CoAsS), but the main source of the element is as a by-product of copper and nickel mining.
Cobalt primarily forms a divalent cation in water and is relatively soluble. Cobalt readily forms coordinate covalent bonds (chelating type) and is often found in organic complexes or as a zero valent colloidal solid.

Cationic cobalt, used in plating solutions, can be removed by a variety of cation resins, depending on pH and TDS.

Colloidal cobalt is removed by a combination of static attraction and ion exchange.