Researchers have scaled up a method of mining rare metals from the earth in a much cleaner and more efficient way than standard techniques, Tech Xplore reported.
These elements power some of the most widespread technologies on the planet — like smartphones and computers — as well as growing industries like electric vehicles. Yet the process of releasing them from the Earth's crust does a real number on the environment due to the large amounts of water and harsh chemicals it needs.
To improve this outlook, a team of metallurgists and geochemists at Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry partnered with an engineer from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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Less than $30K 🤷 Their approach was to basically move the desired elements into a concentrated cluster while they were still underground, so that only a smaller section of earth had to be mined, Tech Xplore explained.
Sounds a bit like sorcery, right? In reality, the team was simply taking advantage of the rare metals' natural reaction to an electric field. They created one underground using over 150 plastic electrodes dropped into drilled holes. Then they injected ammonium sulfate into the mining site to help with extraction. The resulting charge between the electrodes was able to move the rare metals closer together, according to Tech Xplore.
Digging up and finding them after all that versus the usual way of doing things was found to be like night and day. In a test operation, the new method slashed 95% of the ammonia output, and the overall extraction was 95% efficient, way up from the typical 40-60%, per the outlet.
The team's success in curbing the environmental impacts of mining for things like iPhone and EV batteries has the potential to flip the hugely profitable tech industry on its head.
Going forward, the researchers wish to make the technique cleaner by drawing power from a clean energy source, since it needs a lot of external electricity to work properly. Their full findings are published in Nature Sustainability.
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