Rare Earth Elements Recovery and Reuse
Rare earth elements are currently used in the manufacture of cell phones, hybrid engines, specialty magnets, computer hard drives, and an increasing number of electronic components and other consumer products. Rare earth elements are also vital raw materials for the production of military equipment, including weapons guidance systems, optical technology, engines, propulsion systems, stealth technology, and hardened ceramics for vehicle and body armor. These materials have been designated as critical for national security and domestic manufacturing by the United States Government.
Periodic Products’ patented Chelok® polymer compounds rapidly bind to rare earth elements. Periodic Products has shown that this recovery and reclamation technology is applicable to phosphate fertilizer waste, coal ash, acidic mine drainage, and incinerator waste. Further, non-optimized pilot plant yields were equal to those currently obtained by the rare earth mining industry from raw ore, without the environmental impact associated with mining operations.
Prior to the development of the Chelok® Technology, an efficient and economically viable low environmental impact process to extract and recover rare earth and other elements from these waste products was not possible.
Periodic Products has also developed MetalXtract® filtration technology that utilizes the relatively large size of its polymers to rapidly separate the polymer-metal complexes from aqueous media, including various extraction solutions, making the recovery of low concentrations of rare earth and other metals from solid materials possible.
The financial and environmental costs associated with recovering rare earth elements from mining waste are significantly less than the respective costs of obtaining these metals from mined ore. It is estimated that the cost of Periodic Products’ extraction and isolation technology is approximately 40% of the current cost of mining and isolating these metals, and less than 50% of the cost of competing extraction/concentration technologies, making this process economically viable.
