Many electronic devices, from smartphones and computers to wind turbines, include rare earth elements. These elements are both scarce and often only obtainable from China. These challenges have gotten the attention of the U.S. government, which is eager to find ways to reuse rare earths found in no-longer-needed devices.
That’s where researchers at Texas A&M University come in. They’ve developed a new way of extracting rare earth elements from old devices and electronic waste, making the elements available for use in new gadgets and equipment.
Dr. Jenny Qiu, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A&M, and a leader of the research team, joined the Standard with more. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: What are rare earth elements, and how are they used in technology products?
Jenny Qiu: Okay, so for real earth elements, actually, they are some special elements, including lanthanides, scandian, and some essential materials for electronics, magnets, and clean energy technologies.
So particularly, a lot of hard drives in our laptops contain the neodymium-based magnets. They are the strongest permanent magnets available.
You mentioned hard drives and also smartphones. What other kinds of devices use rare earth elements?
So especially those devices containing permanent magnets, if they demonstrate some permanent magnet properties. They are also widely used in wind turbines, electrical vehicles, data storage devices. So yeah, for those electronic devices, they contain a large amount of rare earth elements than the other devices.
But up to now, it’s been very challenging to extract these materials from devices people no longer need. Why is that, and how does your team’s research hope to change this?
This is because most traditional separation techniques like precipitation, ion exchange, electrochemical or solvent extraction — those traditional methods face challenges. Usually they demonstrate a very limited selectivity and they require a high cost. They also generate secondary waste that poses significant environmental risks.
So that’s why our team developed a new method using a mesoporous carbon form to extract those real earth elements from electronic waste based solutions.
So for those of us who aren’t part of the research and not necessarily scientists, explain how that process works in kind of layman’s terms.
So actually for our 3D carbon porous form, we didn’t use the traditional materials that are used in ion exchange membrane. We develop nanomaterial-based, novel porous structures.
And those materials can demonstrate a more efficient, more selective rare earth element recovery from the rare earth elements solutions with significantly reduced cost and significantly reduced processing steps.
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You’ve received funding for this research from the Department of Energy. Can you talk about the national security implications related to rare earth elements? For example, many of them are sourced in China, correct?
Yeah, that’s true. So right now, it’s a very difficult time because in the United States, although we do have some rare earth element mining resources, due to those strict regulations and the high refining cost. Actually it will result in our heavy reliance on rare earth element imports.
So, right now, due the supply chain disruption, it’s difficult for us to get those rare earth elements in a large amount. So it makes the fabrication of those electronic devices like wind turbines and electrical vehicles difficult because we need a lot of rare earth elements.
So right now, that’s why we would like to use a new method to recover rare earth elements from electronic waste instead of from those rare earth mining resources.
To reuse that material that’s already being discarded?
Yes, exactly.
So this is an uncertain time for federal grant funding. Are you confident that your project will go forward as planned?
Yes, we are very excited. We are looking forward to the DOE-supported project. So we are trying to use the proposed research methodology and try to harvest more material. We’re trying to scale up our method to get more valuable rare earth elements from e-waste materials.
So you’re confident about the grant funding and your challenge now is to scale this up. So what do you envision in the future as you move forward?
I think the most important thing we could do right now to overcome this supply chain disruption is to develop a new method using cutting-edge research like nanotechnology, like the sustainable manufacturing method, to develop new materials for critical material harvesting.
