INL develops rare earths technology, first license from U.S. Rare Earths

The Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Institute has developed a new technology to extract rare earth minerals and metals for recycling.

“Rare earths are used to make the high technology apparatuses that we’re very interested in having such as our cell phones, the red color in your cell phone screen is indespensible,” said Eric Peterson, laboratory fellow at INL and a co-inventor of the project.

The recycling of these materials is something that has been extremely limited, but with this new membrane solvent extraction research- these critical materials can be used effectively.

Mining rare earth materials takes a lot of energy to mine and restore, making it important to recycle them and not get them put in a waste dump.

“It’s a huge energy savings to recover and reuse these materials,” said Peterson.

Tune in tonight to learn more about these rare earth materials and the new technology developed to recycle them.