Highlights
- Jenny Qiu is working on recovering critical materials from electronic waste.
- The US imports 85% of its rare earth elements due to environmental regulations.
- Current recycling methods for rare earth elements are inefficient and generate waste.
- Jenny’s team is developing a solid phase extraction method for better recovery.
- Collaboration with industrial partners is essential for scaling up recovery processes.
- There is a growing interest in rare earth elements in academia and industry.
- E-waste contains valuable materials like neodymium used in strong magnets.
- The Apple AirPods and HDDs are examples of e-waste with high rare earth content.
- A complete ecosystem is needed for effective industrial scale-up of recovery methods.
- The future of rare earth recovery looks promising with ongoing research and collaboration.
In this episode of the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast, host Dustin Olsen and co-host Daniel O’Connor engage with Jenny Qiu, an Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, to discuss her groundbreaking research on the recovery of rare earth elements from electronic waste. The conversation explores the importance of rare earth elements in modern technology, the challenges of current recycling methods, and innovative approaches being developed to improve recovery rates and reduce environmental impact. Jenny emphasizes the need for collaboration between academia and industry to create a sustainable ecosystem for rare earth recovery, highlighting the potential for a Critical Material Recovery Center at Texas A&M. The episode concludes with a discussion on the future of e-waste recycling and the critical role of rare earth elements in technology.
Chapters
- 00:00 Introduction to Rare Earth Elements and E-Waste Recycling
- 06:03 Challenges in E-Waste Recycling
- 11:06 Future Prospects and Industry Partnerships
- 15:57 Conclusion and Call to Action
Listen to the REEx Podcast
(opens in a new tab)Transcript
Dustin Olsen (00:01.014)
Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast. You’re joined with me, my co-host Daniel, and we have a special guest, Jenny, who is from the Texas A University. And she’s working on some super exciting technology, and we think it could change a lot of things. So, Jenny, thank you so much for being on the podcast with us today. I would love first to get us started. Give us a brief
summary of your background and some of the work that you’re doing right now.
Jenny Qiu (00:33.793)
Hi, good afternoon everyone. My name is Jenny Chiu, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A.M. at a college station. So my research is mainly nanomaterials and advanced manufacturing. So actually right now we are working on the recovery of critical materials from electronic waste. So that’s the topic we are interested in right now.
Dustin Olsen (00:59.276)
That’s amazing. Yeah, electronic waste. There’s a lot of it and probably more than anyone would ever realize, I’m sure. How long have you been working on that?
Jenny Qiu (01:09.183)
So about two years.
Dustin Olsen (01:11.918)
Cool, awesome. Daniel, what questions you got for Jenny?
Daniel O’Connor (01:17.159)
Yeah, well, think, know, Jenny, we found you. don’t know how it was probably some news from the university. And we were really impressed with where you and your colleagues were going with this. you know, our understanding is that, you know, we’re looking at sort of a recycling process and it’s possibly a novel way to do that, to recycle electronic waste to potentially get, you know,
rare earth output, critical output that can be used over and over, maybe for magnets and other very important products. And I think it might be good at a high level to talk about why this is so important. mean, from your perspective today, this same, well, first of all, there’s very little recycling today, right? So for the separation of rare earth elements for metals, for example, it’s a fairly,
Jenny Qiu (02:07.636)
Yep.
Daniel O’Connor (02:15.06)
It’s a fairly dirty process, it’s polluting, and there’s various initiatives to recycle, and we would put that in this category. Could you maybe talk a little bit about, at a high level, how the approach you all are working on might differ from other types of rare earth separation recycling methodologies?
Jenny Qiu (02:40.893)
Yeah, actually we are particularly interested in near-DMN based NDF-EB magnets. You may know they are among the strongest permanent magnets. Yeah, it’s widely used in like wind turbines, electrical vehicles, and the data storage devices. So actually in United States, we do have some real earth mining resources, but due to strict regulation just for environmental protection.
and high refining costs. So actually even here now, our United States, we need to import like 85 % of real earth elements from foreign countries. So that’s why we say we are in urgent need of real earth elements. And actually there is a lot of uncertainty in supply chains. So that’s why we say the recovery of real earth elements from electronic waste could be very important, I would say, secondary options. Yeah, in addition to the mining.
the REE mining resources. So the recovery from electronic waste is very important. It’s very promising strategy to solve this critical material needs in the market. So typically if we talk about the recovery, REE recovery techniques and separation techniques, we will talk about like a precipitation, ion exchange or…
like some solvent extraction method. But those method, there are a lot of challenges such as poor selectivity, high cost, a lot of manual operations involved, and a lot of secondary waste generation. So those generation could oppose some secondary environmental risks. So that’s why we say we tried to develop a novel real earth element recovery method from electronic waste.
with less waste generation, secondary waste generation with less environmental risk, but indicated a higher selectivity. We can extract and separate rare earth elements with a high percentage, high purity from electronic waste with the affordable cost. So in this procedure, through our a lot of efforts on the…
Jenny Qiu (04:54.901)
the rare earth element recovery. We hope this technology can be used for larger scale application, for industrial applications, yeah, with high purity and yeah, with low cost. So for our technology actually, basically it’s called a solid phase extraction. So this method, yeah, it doesn’t require a lot of organic solvent. So that’s why we say, yeah, it’s called a solid phase. The absorption offers a simple method and it’s based on some carbon.
nanomaterial based adsorbent, so particularly graphene based composites. So we think, yeah, it is very promising to be used in this field. So that’s why we are interested in this research and hopefully we can get more results and get it published so everyone else can see our research outcomes.
Daniel O’Connor (05:43.555)
And I will get to the publishing. Yeah, we saw that this was a 3D mesoporous carbon structure enabling what appears to be an economical way to recycle certain rare earths out of electronics. It’s non-polluting. I mean, this almost sounds too good, Jenny. Almost sounds too good. Especially, you know…
I wanted to ask you, if you look at the recycling today, from what I know, less than 1 % of the magnets in the United States come from recycling. I mean, that’s nothing. That’s a very small number. Why is that? Is it just we’re early on in the sort of evolution of exploring this technology?
Jenny Qiu (06:34.099)
Yeah, actually for the recovery from electronic waste is still at early stage. And as I mentioned, a lot of traditional separation technology involves many steps, multi-steps, maybe sometimes tens of steps or maybe thousands of steps. And they generate a lot of secondary waste, like a lot of wasted organic solvents. So there are a lot of concern in those procedure. It’s difficult for those techniques to be scaled up for industrial application.
So that’s why we are trying to use some solid phase green solution to solve this problem for safer extraction of high value real earth elements from those electronic waste.
Daniel O’Connor (07:17.412)
Yes, that’s right. I mean, the more we learn about this, the more I think groups like yourselves and others that are working on innovative ways to recycle are going to be instrumental in the next five years. If we look at your approach, is it novel in the sense that it’s sort of a nano carbon based approach or are there other?
comparable? Is it a race in this approach? Are you all at the forefront and have you filed any patents, for example?
Jenny Qiu (07:56.543)
So as far as we know, most the methodology used to extract the real earth element from electronic waste, either solvent extraction or if someone used solid materials, they mainly used either powder or particle based or membrane based. So we don’t know anyone before us used the 3D porous form for the large scale electronic waste recovery.
to get the rarest elements yet. So that’s why we say, the most important thing is the structure of our adsorbent. We use a 3D porous structure instead of a 2D film, all those particles.
Daniel O’Connor (08:41.989)
Right, right. again, if you’re not able to talk about it, no worries. have you all filed a patent? Because we have a lot of investors, lot of investors and executives from different companies coming to rare earth exchanges now. They might be interested. Have you all filed a patent yet?
Jenny Qiu (08:43.071)
Yeah.
Jenny Qiu (09:04.209)
We found a provisional pattern on this specific porous, 3D metal porous carbon foam. But actually, right now, we still need to explore more, I would say, the real earth elements from diverse electronic waste, because there are so many different kinds of electronic waste. Some of them contains a larger concentration of the real earth elements, some others in low concentration.
Daniel O’Connor (09:12.016)
Okay.
Jenny Qiu (09:31.537)
Our expectation is, yeah, with this specific material structure, it’s capable for us, it’s capable of extracting the real earth element, even when the concentration in some electronic ways is pretty low, we can still recover them. This is our expectation. We are still working on it, of course.
Daniel O’Connor (09:52.612)
So, and you know what’s fascinating would be, and again, only if you can share, but are there’s, it sounds like there’s certain electronic waste that has a higher, richer concentration than others.
Dustin Olsen (09:58.19)
you
Jenny Qiu (10:07.069)
Yes, yeah like we talked about like the the the Neodymium NDF-EB, Neodymium Iron Boron, yeah so it’s the strongest magnet so far. So actually yeah this is actually we can find it a lot of NDF-EB in hard drive disk so we call it HDD.
So actually, yeah, it’s just that you can find it in your personal laptop, right? And yeah, sometimes desktops. that’s why we say, well, this is waste. If we can utilize, we can leverage, this is an electronic waste. Maybe in the future, we don’t have to worry about the shortage of rare earth elements in United States.
Daniel O’Connor (10:32.366)
Yeah, yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (10:48.131)
Right, no, I think it’s incredible what you’re working on. And again, maybe this is too detailed or maybe we can just look at a high level. mean, do you have a sense of how much waste, depending upon the type of electronic waste, to volume or amount of product?
Is it, have you got it down to that level of mathematics where you can forecast, hey, we have, you know, a million hard drives, so therefore we’ll get X amount of rare earth element output. Are you at that level yet or are you still kind of figuring it out?
Jenny Qiu (11:31.557)
We are working on it. So hopefully we can get the results published soon.
Daniel O’Connor (11:33.228)
Okay, yeah. Understood. And we don’t want to talk about anything that you got to publish first. Publish as it is in the university, Jenny, publish or perish. So, I mean, and tell us a little bit more about your team. is it a big team? And some of the disciplines that are involved with this process. I mean, is it?
Jenny Qiu (11:43.817)
Yes. Yeah.
Dustin Olsen (11:46.924)
No.
Daniel O’Connor (12:01.987)
a large team or is it a small team and what kinds of scientists do you need to have these kinds of breakthroughs?
Jenny Qiu (12:11.221)
So actually, right now we are in collaboration with Dr. Wang in industrial and the system engineering at Texas A &M. So yeah, we are also in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Lab. Yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (12:24.108)
Okay, that’s right. think I saw that too. And know, Oak Ridge has been very active in sort of trying to have a resurgence of rare earth element technology breakthrough. Very high quality place. So that’s great. What do you see as key challenges, again, without going into any details that, you know, get in the way of publishing or put another way.
If this is a football game, it’s a football game, and we want to get a touchdown, and the touchdown is that we’re really on our way, at least in the United States, to be able to produce large amounts of rare earth elements for Magnus for what our needs are. And we want to do it through recycling. Are we on the 20 yard line?
Are we on the five yard line? Are we on the 30 yard line? Are we on the 50 yard line? My sense is we’re probably like on the five or 10 yard line, but trying to go downfield.
Jenny Qiu (13:31.455)
So I think for the real industrial scale up, actually it needed a build up of a complete ecosystem. It’s not only from university. Yeah, so the industrial pattern, they play an important role because we need to make sure right now, actually what we are doing, personally, I think we are doing the downstream production, the recovery procedure. We need to make sure we have sufficient supply of the feed stock, e-waste feed stock.
So I would say this is not something we can do on our own. We need to collaborate with different industrial partners, national labs, and everyone. yeah, I think we are close. are on the right direction. But still, maybe more and more interested in real earth elements will join us. And we can work together. And it’s a promising way to solve the urgent real earth need.
Daniel O’Connor (14:27.955)
it’s so important what you’re working on, Jenny, because it’s sustainable. mean, all of a sudden, you have a much cleaner way to do this. You have a tighter supply chain domestically. It just works all the way around. The planet benefits. It’s just wonderful. mean, from the standpoint of… So I get what you’re saying, and yes, an industrial ecosystem has to be in place.
Jenny Qiu (14:56.638)
Yes.
Daniel O’Connor (14:57.826)
Have you noticed, let’s just say in the past six months, and I’d like to say it’s because of our website, but you know, I’m biased. Have you noticed more interest in this topic?
Jenny Qiu (15:11.536)
Yeah, of course. I think there is an increasing need. Right now, actually, if you pay attention to DOE funding opportunity, that’s what we faculty pay a lot of attention to. Actually, there a lot of funding opportunities on real earth element recently in the last two years. Yes. Yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (15:23.19)
Haha.
Daniel O’Connor (15:27.158)
Really? Yeah, that’s good to know. That’s interesting. I’ve kind of heard that. as far as industry players, and again, don’t say any names, but does Texas A have you put together any partnerships other than the federal lab with any industry players yet? Or is it still a little early? Or you can’t tell me.
Dustin Olsen (15:46.31)
Okay.
Jenny Qiu (15:57.725)
Yeah, actually Texas AM is very supportive to our project. Yeah, they provide a different, different supports, not only in proposal writing, but also in industrial collaborators. So they helped us to explore more and more industrial partners. Yeah, so hopefully in the future we could have one, one larger center called the Critical Material Recovery Center. That’s our expectation. I would say, yeah, maybe in a few years we will. Yeah.
Daniel O’Connor (16:12.737)
That’s great. That’s really good.
Jenny Qiu (16:27.593)
build up such a center.
Daniel O’Connor (16:27.903)
Yeah, that would be incredible. That would really be incredible. I mean, I’ll take a step back. I mean, is there anything that you can volunteer that you think might be relevant for our audience and readers out there that we haven’t covered?
Jenny Qiu (16:47.733)
In my opinion, think the real-earth element is an emerging field, especially in the last two years. We do need lot of collaborators, including the academic field and the industry field. So we need to collaborate together, and I believe we could really make it happen.
Daniel O’Connor (17:08.693)
Yes, yeah, I agree with you. mean, that’s a very important point. mean, for, you know, in your university, are you getting a pipeline of future scientists and technicians that you feel are students embracing this? Are they wanting to go down this direction? Are you finding that they’re more interested in this?
Jenny Qiu (17:32.677)
Yes, yeah, actually right now I have two PhD students working with me. So yeah, on this project, Critical Material Recovery. And I believe actually I think I’m not alone. There are some other professors working in similar topics. So we will collaborate closely and explore more opportunities.
Dustin Olsen (17:45.33)
Okay.
Daniel O’Connor (17:53.043)
That’s great. Well, I can say this. mean, you know, part of what Rare Earth Exchanges is doing is bringing people together. So, you know, if we ever get the chance to talk to the university, we can share that, you know, a lot of folks are coming to our website. We have a forum where people communicate. We have this podcast. We actually have a Rare Earth supply chain ranking system that we’re doing for investors. So…
upstream, midstream, downstream and recycling. So in our database is going to be Texas A because of what you’re doing. I think we’ve covered, Jenny, I think we’ve hit the high level key points that we were interested in. Dustin, think we can start to wrap it up.
Dustin Olsen (18:45.272)
Yeah, so I just, had one question as I was listening to the conversation here is, so we’re doing e-waste, electronic waste, but there’s more to e-waste than just
critical magnets and things like that, right? What happens to everything else from the electronic device or whatever? What are you guys doing with that? Is there other recycling that’s going on? Once you recover the rare earth or the critical mineral element, what happens to the rest of the waste?
Jenny Qiu (19:20.927)
So I’m not sure if I’m the best one to answer this question because actually, right now we are working on the magnet based on waste. But it’s true, there are so many different kinds of electronic waste. I will say if they contain a higher concentration of critical materials, usually those waste will be studied, will be recovered.
and try to get those high value critical materials back into the system again. But for some other e-waste, if they don’t consist of high value critical material, yeah, I would say those rest e-waste might be wasted and removed from the material cycle. But it’s true, I think, yeah, like I mentioned, yeah.
Dustin Olsen (20:05.486)
Great. And then what are some examples of
Jenny Qiu (20:10.175)
the magnet-based e-waste is not the only one. Some others recycle like noble metals from e-waste. Some others could be interested in some other different critical material. it’s just, Yeah, maybe some scientists from National Lab, yeah, they are the best one to answer the question.
Dustin Olsen (20:34.452)
You waste that have high amounts of critical materials in it. are we talking iPhones, TVs, like speakers? What are we, what’s an example of a device that has lots of these materials in it?
Jenny Qiu (20:42.632)
Yeah.
Jenny Qiu (20:49.617)
Yeah, like I mentioned, HDD is of course one of them. And actually the Apple AirPods, the earphone actually, the AirPods, Also, yeah, and some fluorescent lamps also contains the real earth elements. So.
Dustin Olsen (20:53.688)
Mm-hmm.
Daniel O’Connor (20:58.427)
Wow. Wow. Wow.
Dustin Olsen (21:07.278)
All right, wow, isn’t that incredible that devices that are so small that fit into our ears have high amounts of critical material. That’s incredible. Daniel, you were gonna say something? sorry, Jenny, go ahead.
Jenny Qiu (21:09.737)
Yeah.
Yes.
Right.
Daniel O’Connor (21:20.094)
go ahead, go ahead Jenny.
Jenny Qiu (21:22.322)
it’s okay, yeah, go ahead.
Daniel O’Connor (21:24.255)
Well, I was just going to say what’s beautiful about this is it’s sort of the circular economy concept where, you know, we waste less, you know, we’re, consume, obviously we use products through the life cycle. Then it goes through the, for example, you know, Dustin to the center that Jenny’s going to set up with Texas A &M, the federal lab and some industry partners. And they’re going to show, and we had an estimate of 12 to 24 months based on some
of the research we did that there could be a pilot within 12 to 24 months. And then you’re recycling and you’re actually producing magnets that can be used to make other products. it’s extremely important work, Jenny. I just want to share with you, we’re really grateful for the work you’re doing. You we started this to try to help raise awareness to this very important issue. It’s clearly happening now.
And I think you’re one of those heroes out there. You’re innovating, and this is what is needed.
Jenny Qiu (22:32.809)
Thank you. So actually I’m also very excited about this project. So if possible, and actually I’m very happy to talk about my research and your platform about a real earth element. So if possible, I would like to know more collaboration opportunity with upstream, the intermediate stream with those industrial partners. So we could have set up like some symposium to talk about more collaboration opportunities. So it will be very helpful for both of us.
Dustin Olsen (22:33.262)
you
Daniel O’Connor (23:01.117)
We plan on facilitating those. So for example, we could do symposium physical or we can do it digital and bring different people, different universities together. There’s a lot going on and it’s hard. It’s very dispersed and decentralized. So we’re in a of a unique position because we’re sort of collecting a lot of different information and talking to a lot of different people. So what we can do is keep in touch with you.
and sort of share ideas. if you and your colleagues at the university find that it’s useful, we’d be happy to work with you and do something.
Jenny Qiu (23:39.657)
Thank you so much.
Dustin Olsen (23:41.31)
That’d be awesome. So Jenny, for those who are interested in getting on the ground floor with the research you’re doing or just to follow along with the work that you’re doing, is there somewhere that we could send them? Maybe you have a webpage with the university. Where can we send them so they can just follow along and learn more?
Jenny Qiu (24:00.469)
Yeah, I will send you my lab web page after today’s meeting. yeah, if you’re interested, I could send you through my email.
Dustin Olsen (24:08.814)
Great, that’d be awesome. We’ll include that in our show description notes for those that are listening or watching. Look for that link in our description there. And with that, Jenny, unless you have anything else that could maybe put everything into perspective for us, I think we’re good.
Jenny Qiu (24:27.721)
Okay, yeah, I’m good.
Dustin Olsen (24:29.816)
Perfect. Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks Jenny for joining us and we’ll see everyone next week where Daniel and I are going to talk some more about recent news. So we’ll catch you guys later. Bye.
Jenny Qiu (24:42.133)
Okay, thank you.
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