The project Biorecover will investigate new sustainable and safe biotechnologies for the selective extraction of a range of critical raw materials from secondary & primary sources. These will be rare earth metals from bauxite residue, magnesium from low grade mineral wastes and by-products, and platinum group metals from flotation wastes. To this end, Biorecover will be based on the integration of three main stages to reach the expected targets: (1) Remove the major impurities present in raw materials to make the target metals available. (2) Mobilize these metals through microorganisms to get a leachate enriched with the desired metals. (3) To recover the metals with high selectivity & purity. Downstream processes will be also studied for the reuse of the metals (brakes pads, oxygen sensors, powder Mg, & catalysts).
The different stages of the processes provide a modular capacity increasing its flexibility. The awareness, trust, and acceptance by society for the importance of the raw materials will be addressed by a communication campaign and public perception studies.
To achieve this ambitious project, a multidisciplinary consortium covering the whole value chain (from suppliers to end users) will be involved.
The project is part of the research in the research group Systems Biology of Microorganisms Research Group and in Linnaeus University Centre for Ecology and Evolution in Microbial model Systems (EEMiS).