Professor Justin Wilson’s lab has created a new material that acts like a Brita filter for rare earth elements, offering a cleaner, scalable solution to one of the world’s most pressing recycling challenges.
UC Santa Barbara chemistry professor Justin Wilson has partnered with the mineral recovery company REEGen to develop a low-waste technique for reclaiming rare earth elements from electronic waste. By combining precision chelation chemistry with a resin-based filtration system, the team created a method that concentrates rare earth metals from industrial waste streams while avoiding toxic solvents and high energy costs.
“The rare earth elements are critical components of many high-tech materials, but their extraction from raw ores is not economically and environmentally friendly,” said lead author Yangyang Gao, a postdoctoral researcher in Wilson’s lab.
“If we have different chelators and figure out how to attach them here, we could start to target different metal ions, like mercury, cadmium and lead,” Wilson added.
Published in Communications Chemistry, the approach offers a promising step toward scalable, domestic recovery of these critical materials, with implications for clean technology, national security and environmental sustainability. Read the full story on The Current.
Photo credit: Matt Perko