🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: Researchers prospect for increasingly essential elements from both natural ores and human-made wastes.
Huge dump trucks haul platinum ore, whose supply is dwindling around the world. Some researchers and companies are turning to the deep sea and even asteroids in search of fresh sources. Make no mistake: We are running out of elements. As humans have filled in all the corners of the periodic table, each element has resulted in technological innovation.
But after a century of heavy industrial activity, we also have a wealth of human waste products full of reclaimable elements: wastewater, discarded consumer electronics and even pollution in the atmosphere. Technologies that scientists are developing to clean up these wastes can literally turn trash into treasure. “If you’re going to remove it, why not recover it?” says William Tarpeh, a chemical engineer at Stanford University.
Arctic nations joined forces from 2012 to 2016 on the Circum-Arctic Mineral Resource Project to compile data on the region’s riches. They identified several major deposits, including one of the world’s largest sites of rare earth elements at Kvanefjeld in Greenland. And as the Arctic Circle warms, more areas like Greenland’s interior and the Arctic Ocean’s seafloor will open up. But the changing climate also increases the challenges, warns Zinck.
No deep-sea mining operations are running now, but companies and countries are eager to change that. Australian company Nautilus Minerals intends to begin commercial mining of seafloor massive sulfides off the coast of Papua New Guinea once it untangles itself from financial trouble. Diamond Fields Resources is looking to do the same off the coast of Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea.
Hunter-Scullion is building a comprehensive database of other potential resources that might be found in these platinum-rich asteroids, including base metals like iron and nickel, as well as organic carbon and phosphorus, to further boost mining profits. He’s also hoping to find water, which could support humanity’s expansion into space.
The advantage of prospecting in these wastes is that the elements aren’t trapped inside of rocks. Instead, the challenge is one of careful chemical separation of the wanted from the unwanted at a molecular level. To do this, researchers have designed what are called capture agents, molecules and materials that bind only to the desired substances. Some have engineered bacteria to secrete proteins that bind to specific elements, for example.
To that end, companies have pioneered various methods to better reclaim the valuable parts of our old tech. Urban Mining Co. focuses on extracting neodymium-iron-boron magnets from hard drives, wind turbines and more, turning them into powder and making new magnets directly from that. And Umicore’s furnaces can melt and separate any of 17 elements from old catalytic converters and circuit boards.
But it’s not easy. One of the biggest problems is that, even though carbon dioxide levels are high, the gas still makes up just 0.04 percent of the atmosphere. To draw this tiny amount of carbon from the air effectively, the startup company Carbon Engineering in Squamish, British Columbia, built a device that forces air into contact with an alkaline solution that absorbs carbon dioxide.
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