New Method to Extract Rare Earth Elements from Industrial Wastes

Many methods have been tried in the past, but they use solvents that cause environmental pollution or recover rare earths only once. Recently, researchers have developed a new solvent-free and eco-friendly method to extract rare earths from industrial wastes.

Rare earths are a group of seventeen chemical elements that occur together in the periodic table. The treatment of wastewater containing low concentrations but high prices of REEs is one of the important issues in the REEs separation and refining industry.

A research team led by Kwon In-Chan, a professor of protein engineering at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, has developed a platform to recover rare earth elements from industrial by-products, according to the National Research Foundation (NRF) in South Korea.

A simple and innovative method for selective extraction and recovery of REEs was achieved by fusing an elastin-like peptide and a high-affinity lanthanide-based element-binding protein, lanmodulin. The protein sorbent can be naturally decomposed to reduce environmental pollution problems.

"The problem with existing technologies is that it is difficult to selectively recover REEs and damage the environment because of the large amount of solvents used. Or it is difficult to reuse eco-friendly bio-absorbents," Kwon said in an NRF statement. "We have developed an eco-friendly, selective and reusable adsorbent that almost overcomes these problems."

Kwon said the ability to maintain rare earth recovery efficiency even when reused a certain number of times shows that this new method can be applied to steel slag and other industrial sites. Kwon's team said in a research paper published on the Advanced Functional Materials. This technology can be applied to recover other precious metals and commodities.

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