Critical raw materials are elements that are of great economic importance, but whose supply is not guaranteed. Industrial waste often contains such valuable elements. The elements in question may even be more concentrated in wastes than in the ores from which they were originally extracted.
We use hydrometallurgical methods to dissolve these elements from the waste and then recover them. We are developing new hydrometallurgical processes for metal recovery based on advanced filtration processes. For example, we use nanofiltration to retain charged ions and to concentrate and separate them from impurities. Metal speciation again serves as the basis for understanding the processes. For nanofiltration, we use both commercially available membranes and our own membranes. These are produced layer-by-layer by us. With the help of nanofiltration, we have already recovered critical raw materials from various industrial wastes, such as waste from TiO2 production and waste from photovoltaics.
Hydrometallurgical methods can be used to dissolve critical raw materials from waste and then recover them.