Less than 1% of the world's rare earth elements are recycled. The rest are mined, used once, and thrown away — even as the United States scrambles to build a supply chain that doesn't run through China.
On this episode of the Rare Earth Exchanges podcast, host Dustin Olsen talks with Alexa Schmitz, CEO and co-founder of ReeGen, a Cornell spinout using engineered bacteria to recover rare earths from industrial waste. Schmitz earned her PhD in plant microbiology at Cornell and founded ReeGen out of the lab of Buz Barstow — a previous REEx guest — in February 2022.
From a Cornell lab to a rare earth startup
Schmitz never planned to start a company. She was finishing her PhD and beginning a postdoc with Barstow when the question that became ReeGen took hold: could synthetic biology and genetic engineering improve rare earth bioleaching enough to make it commercially viable? She credits David Reed, Yoshiko Fujita, and Vicki Thompson at Idaho National Laboratory for the founding work on using Gluconobacter to leach rare earth elements — work that showed promise but thin margins with a wild-type bacterium.
After four years of engineering the microbe and an Activate fellowship that funded her transition from researcher to founder, Schmitz had a system efficient enough to take to market. "I feel like I've taken two MBAs in four years," she says of the journey.
Why is catalytic-converter slag the first feedstock
ReeGen starts in the recycling space, focusing first on slag — the byproduct left over after smelting. When recyclers process catalytic converters for precious metals like platinum, palladium, and rhodium, the rare earths end up in the discarded slag. The insight came from a customer-discovery conversation in which a recycler told Schmitz: "We're bleeding neodymium… we keep having to go back to China for the neodymium."
Catalytic-converter slag turns out to be a surprisingly rich feedstock — around 3 to 3.5% rare earth by weight, higher than many mid-grade mines — though the overall market is modest at an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 metric tons a year. Steel slag, by contrast, is produced at roughly a billion tons worldwide, pointing to a much larger long-term opportunity even at lower grades.
98% recovery — and the economics tradeoff
Rather than release engineered microbes into the environment, ReeGen grows the bacteria to produce a leaching solution — a "biolixiviant" — that is then separated from the microbes and mixed with the slag. At low solids density (around 10%), the system recovers 95 to 98% of the rare earths. At higher pulp density it uses far less liquid but recovery drops toward 70%. ReeGen is now optimizing exactly that tradeoff: maximum yield versus the cheapest economically viable process.
Biomining itself is not new. As Schmitz notes, bioleaching has been industrially commercialized for nearly a century and already produces about 20% of the world's copper and roughly 5% of its gold. A key discovery for ReeGen: after the rare earths are removed, the biolixiviant can be regenerated and reused, cutting the glucose input — sourced from agricultural waste — that drives much of the cost.
Inside the White House rare earth meeting
Schmitz was one of 12 founders invited to the White House to discuss the rare earth supply chain — an invitation she initially assumed was spam. The meeting came shortly after China restricted exports of heavy rare earth elements, and she describes a government, including the Department of Energy, eager to move faster than the decade-plus timelines new mines require. Her candid takeaway: the most accessible rare earths are already sitting in old electronics and industrial waste, and that's where the U.S. can move immediately.
She also argues the U.S. cannot build the entire mineral-to-magnet supply chain alone. The knowledge, talent, and hydrometallurgy expertise are concentrated overseas, and a robust ex-China supply chain will require coordination with Europe, the UK, and others — with China eventually a participant in a global marketplace rather than its dominant force.
What's next for ReeGen
ReeGen recently extended its process downstream, refining its leached solution into a total rare earth oxide (TREO) validated at around 98% purity with a downstream buyer. The 2027 goal: be on site with a first feedstock partner, converting at least 10 tons of slag per day into 200 to 300 kilograms of rare earth oxides — and selling recycled rare earths back into the U.S. supply chain. The company is actively fundraising, finishing a smaller round and preparing a larger raise to fund that first commercial deployment.
Listen to the full episode
Listen to the full conversation with Alexa Schmitz on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and learn more about ReeGen at reegen.tech.
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Full Transcript
Dustin Olsen (00:41)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Rare Earth Exchanges Podcast. I'm your host today, Dustin, and our special guest today is Alexa Schmitz, who is the CEO and co-founder of a company called ReeGen. Alexa has a PhD in plant microbiology from Cornell University, which is where her company spun out from. So Alexa, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Alexa Schmitz (01:06)
Doing pretty great. Thanks for having me on.
Dustin Olsen (01:09)
So you come from Cornell University. About a year ago we interviewed Buz Barstow, who I believe was your mentor, correct?
Alexa Schmitz (01:19)
Correct. He was my postdoctoral advisor.
Dustin Olsen (01:22)
There you go. We got a kick out of Buz. He was truly passionate about this microbiology concept of recovering our earth. And so we're excited to see the other side of that same story — the byproduct of that research. What was it like at Cornell working with Buz? Give us some of how that got started, and how ReeGen spun out from all that.
Alexa Schmitz (01:49)
Yeah, sure. It was quite an adventure and a journey. I did my PhD at Cornell in plant microbiology, where I was doing a lot of microbiology and synthetic biology, and met Buz toward the end of my PhD. I really love Ithaca and the surrounding areas, and I liked the idea of staying here — but more so, Buz had these really amazing ideas about how we could use synthetic biology and microbiology to solve tough problems in clean energy.
In striking up conversation — and I was in the trenches of trying to finish my PhD thesis, the worst time for anybody who's gone through a PhD — I met Buz synergistically at a symposium where I was doing my PhD work. We struck up some conversations and I realized immediately, this is what I want to do. I want to take everything I've learned over the past decade and figure out how to use it to solve problems for clean energy.
And the big problem that we first tackled was the rare earth problem. How can we get these critical metals for clean energy infrastructure as cleanly as possible, to avoid the impacts that take away from the overall benefit of having that clean energy in the first place?
Dustin Olsen (03:03)
It's highly important, the work that you're doing. So did you have the intent to start a business while you were at Cornell? Did you see the opportunity, like, this has to be something I need to lead?
Alexa Schmitz (03:19)
So, no, actually. One thing that few people know about me is I started that postdoc with Buz still very academic. I had been doing basic research through much of my career, especially in my PhD — understanding how biological mechanisms work and how we might potentially apply them. You certainly get bogged down at some point in basic research. I suspect everybody must go through it at some point, thinking, what am I doing? How is this going to make an impact on the world? Is this really going to amount to anything?
I started the postdoc with Buz with a newfound energy. He really likes to take crazy risks, but then things come to fruition in his lab, which is pretty exciting. I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. The idea was: could we engineer the microbe and make it better at rare earth bioleaching?
Before I answer the question about what I was thinking, I want to give due credit to David Reed, Yoshiko Fujita, and Vicki Thompson at Idaho National Lab, who did some of the founding work on using Gluconobacter oxydans to leach rare earth elements. Buz and I were taking a look at that work. There was some commercial potential in what they were doing, but the margins seemed pretty low using a wild-type bacterium.
So our question was: can we use synthetic biology and genetic engineering to improve the system enough to make the margins really at the level that would inspire commercial reality, commercial impact? I spent four years of a postdoc doing just that — what are the mechanisms that make this work, and how can we tweak and tune those sensors to make it better? And to our delight, we actually did engineer a microbe with very high efficiency for rare earth bioleaching.
It was about that point — we had some really crucial mechanisms that we could tune — that I started feeling like this needs to happen. This needs to be a reality. This needs to actually be commercialized. And I started thinking about what it would take. It's not often that you hear biotech and mining together, and to think somebody could go commercialize this was a bit of a reach, I thought. So I figured, why don't I give it a try? That's what I leapt into, and I haven't really looked back since. So no, I didn't see it coming, but I'm very happy I took that turn.
Dustin Olsen (05:48)
That's an exciting story. So how long has it been since you started ReeGen?
Alexa Schmitz (05:55)
We founded ReeGen in February of 2022. I was still a postdoc at Cornell then, wrapping up my second paper in Buz's lab. We had finished engineering the microbe and knew about the efficiency improvements. We started the company with the idea that we'd maybe start it someday — my co-founder and I were thinking maybe in two years or so.
We did some I-Corps training, applied for grants, applied for an ARPA-E scale-up grant. I should mention — and I think Buz talked about this when you interviewed him — that this work was originally sponsored by ARPA-E in the Barstow lab at Cornell, so we're very much embedded in the ARPA-E ecosystem. In 2022 we founded ReeGen to apply for their scale-up grant, which was a little premature. It's a huge grant and we didn't really understand what we were aiming for, so we didn't get invited to submit a full application. No surprise there — at the time we didn't even really have a company.
But at that point the reality started to sink in: let's do this. I applied for a fellowship with Activate, which supports technical founders to translate technical research into commercial reality. Long story short, I got the fellowship, and that was really what inspired me to move full force into ReeGen. I finished my postdoc in the fall of 2022 and went directly into the Activate fellowship. They give you two years of salary support for the founder, a research grant, and travel and professional development support. It was an amazing opportunity — I can't even imagine what we would have done with ReeGen without that fellowship.
For the first two years, my co-founder and I and the team took a step back and asked: what do we have with this technology? What can it do? It's a leaching technology. We engineered the bacteria to produce a very high-efficiency leaching solution, and a big question was: where are all the rare earths — above-ground feedstocks, recycled feedstocks — and what would this leaching solution work best with? So we started testing a bunch of different feedstocks and thinking commercially about what it would take to recover the rare earths from them. Through that work and the Activate fellowship, we developed a business model, a commercialization approach, and a go-to-market plan, and started getting some investment. For the past two years it's been about focusing and enacting that plan — taking it to where we are now, which is just on the cusp of first commercialization with our first commercial partner.
Dustin Olsen (08:58)
That's exciting. A lot has happened in just the last few years.
Alexa Schmitz (09:03)
So much. It's a wild ride. As a technical founder who's gone through this journey, I feel like I've taken two MBAs in four years. It's pretty intense.
Dustin Olsen (09:04)
It's wild when you have to get in the trenches and learn different things, put on different hats to get the work done. Okay, let's talk about the company, the technology you're using, and where you fit into the supply chain. ReeGen is more in the recycling space, correct?
Alexa Schmitz (09:28)
Absolutely. A startup is all about that. Yes, we're starting out in the recycling space.
Dustin Olsen (09:51)
In my research notes on you, you do recycling of slag from catalytic converters, right?
Alexa Schmitz (10:04)
That is where we are focusing first, correct.
Dustin Olsen (10:07)
Could you explain a little about why you selected that as your feedstock, how much of the rare earths you're recovering, and what's left behind?
Alexa Schmitz (10:24)
Sure. To explain it a little more — when we talk about slag, for those who don't know, it's the leftovers, what's left over after smelting other metals. In the case of catalytic converters, the people recycling them are trying to get the precious metals — platinum, palladium, rhodium — all the reasons some of you may have had your catalytic converter stolen. I hope not. My parents have; I have not yet, knock on wood.
Catalytic converters have these precious metals that are incredibly worth recycling, but they actually have a lot of rare earths in them as well. And less than 1% of rare earths are recycled — that applies to catalytic converters too. Just like with electronics, all those rare earths are going someplace. The first two years of ReeGen, we spent a lot of time figuring out where the rare earths are actually ending up.
Knowing they were used in catalytic converters, we came at it from a weird direction. We were trying to talk to people using rare earths for catalytic converters, to see where they get them — a customer-discovery approach. And we talked to somebody who literally said to us, "Yeah, we're bleeding neodymium. We are recycling the platinum, palladium, et cetera, and not recycling these rare earths. We keep having to go back to China for the neodymium." And I'm sure everybody on this podcast understands that is not always the most secure way to get your materials. His point was: if we do so well at recycling these other metals, why can't we recycle the rare earths? And where are they going?
Through that work, in the case of recycling platinum group metals, we found it was ending up in the slag — the part that gets thrown away. In the smelting furnace, it migrates to the top and gets tapped off like broth pulled off of a soup. Through that discovery, we started thinking about all the other processes that involve smelting and realized that slag as a whole contains a lot of these critical metals — rare earth elements and other things like nickel, chromium, zirconium, various smaller-market and alloy metals combined with iron to make different alloys. Slag becomes this potential giant feedstock source for recovery.
The catalytic-converter market isn't huge for rare earths — we've estimated about 50,000 to 60,000 metric tons produced yearly, maybe higher, maybe even upwards of 100,000 depending on market size. But compare that to steel slag, where they're producing a billion tons worldwide. With catalytic-converter slag, because it's concentrated for recycling, you do see high concentrations — three to three and a half percent rare earth elements, which is quite high compared to a mid-grade mine, where you don't usually get full percentage points of rare earth content. With steel slag the overall content is lower, but the market size is huge, so you see the potential for expansion.
A big part of what we're exploring is what's left over. When we leach the slag — apply our biological leaching solution and get the rare earths and some other critical metals out — we reduce the mass of the slag by about 25 to 30%. You still have a lot of solids left over, but some of the most hazardous metals are pulled out and hopefully valorized. That leftover material is milled fine, siliceous, amorphous — it doesn't have much crystalline structure — and the biological process doesn't totally destroy it. We're collaborating with a researcher at Cornell to look at using it in concrete applications, as a supplement for ordinary Portland cement. It's still in its infancy and not part of our dependent business model, but it could be huge — not just for the business model but for the built environment in general.
Dustin Olsen (14:55)
That's truly fascinating. Of the slag, how much of the rare earths are you recovering? It was pretty high — like 98% or something?
Alexa Schmitz (15:07)
It can be up to 98%. Maybe I should take a step back and talk about what we're actually doing when we recover the rare earths. Something that often comes up when I talk about biomining: the world knows biomining in terms of what's done for copper and gold. This concept of bioleaching and biomining isn't new — it's been industrially commercialized for almost a hundred years. We get 20% of the world's copper through bioleaching, and about 5% of the world's gold. I'm sure Buz told you this too. It's a staggering number, and you want to recognize that bacteria know how to do this — we're just trying to make it better.
However, with rare earth elements it's a very different chemistry. And because we've engineered the microbes, we don't want to be throwing them into the environment and doing what they want — that takes more testing, and we hope to develop those processes later. So what we've done is put together a system where the bacteria make a bioleaching solution on a continuous basis, which we then separate from the microbes and mix with the slag to leach the metals out.
The slag has three to three and a half percent rare earths. When we mix the solids with that liquid — what we call a biolixiviant, and the rare-earth-targeted one we call BioResolve — the density of the solids has a big impact on efficiency. When we only have about 10% solids to solution, we see amazing efficiency, upwards of 95 to 98% rare earth leaching. That's super exciting, because it means there's potential for recovering all of the rare earths from these materials. But it's a trade-off with economics, because the lower the density of the solids, the more solution you need. For every ton of slag we put into the system, we'd need 10 tons of the live leaching solution. So 1-to-10 is much bigger overall than, say, a 50% pulp density, where everything is smaller and somewhat cheaper — less liquid to make per cycle — but then efficiency drops to more like 70% extraction.
We're at the stage now where we have a scaled system and we're optimizing exactly that question: do we go for gold and get 98% efficiency, or do the economics work better if we only get 70% efficiency but it's so cheap that it's a no-brainer to do it that way?
Dustin Olsen (18:04)
It's all very fascinating — the dynamics of inputs and outputs and the constraints around that. Speaking of constraints, thinking back to that conversation with Buz, one thing that stood out was that the biotech is great and it works, but there's a finite amount of — I'm trying to remember what he said — the input that's needed to truly make the whole system work. Is that another constraint you have with this technology?
Alexa Schmitz (18:42)
So you're saying, is there a constraint on —
Dustin Olsen (18:46)
The biotech part — the biology you use in your process. You can only fabricate or get so much before —
Alexa Schmitz (18:56)
Yeah. I think maybe you're thinking about an aspect of the system that Buz discussed. The way our process works is we feed the bacteria low-grade glucose, which we get from agricultural waste. Buz has done some modeling: if we took all the glucose available in the world, is it enough to get the critical elements we need? In a straightforward approach, the answer he came up with was no — that would just use up all the resources. So the question remains: is there enough glucose to target the critical metals the earth needs? We can grow the bacteria on other things, and we can engineer them to use other sugars, so those are two things that push us away from that constraint.
But there are two other things I'd say. The first is just a logical point: this isn't necessarily going to be the end-all solution for leaching metals. It's not necessarily the best approach for everything. We've been mining for millennia — we have some of these systems down pat, and some are more hazardous than others. It's the really hazardous ones and the more recalcitrant systems where I think biology holds the most potential to crack. There are some really difficult-to-crack minerals that our bacteria can already crack pretty well, and others we can sort of do, but we're excited about doing more engineering to use what biology and nature have created over the entirety of life to find novel ways to crack those minerals efficiently.
The other thing I wanted to point out: even if we tackle huge amounts of minerals and need lots of biolixiviant, one really cool thing we discovered once we translated this work to ReeGen is that after we remove the rare earths from the leached solution — we mix biolixiviant and solids together, the rare earths and critical minerals get into the leachate, and after we remove them — that leachate, that biolixiviant, becomes regenerated and we can use it again. So the more times we use it, the less glucose we need to produce new solution. That's one of the things we're ramping up: how many times can we reuse this? We don't want to consume all the world's glucose — that's not feasible, and glucose is a major driver in the economics even if we're using agricultural waste. Discovering that we could reuse the lixiviant is a really key factor in our model that has pushed the economics quite favorably toward lower and lower grade feedstock.
Dustin Olsen (21:46)
What a well-put answer to a poorly articulated question I asked.
Alexa Schmitz (21:49)
No, no. I kind of guessed that's what it was, and it's a really good point to make. Thank you.
Dustin Olsen (21:57)
I appreciate that. I want to shift gears a little away from the business. I read that you were one of 12 people invited to the White House to talk to the federal government about the rare earth supply chain. What an invite. How did you get that? It seems like a pretty exclusive group. I want to know what was said, and whether you feel they took it to heart — are you seeing impacts of that conversation?
Alexa Schmitz (22:23)
It's a great question. To be honest, when we were invited, I thought it was spam. I get so much spam as a startup founder — I thought it was a hoax, that somebody was phishing. But it wasn't, and it was impressive. I was quite impressed that the White House, and the Department of Energy, played a big role in that meeting. They were eager to figure out how to solve this rare earth problem.
It was right after China had cut off the shipments — last spring, in May, they restricted the export of the heavy rare earth elements. That was a big power play the U.S. government did not like, and rightfully so. So Washington was figuring out how to get the rare earths as quickly as possible. To their credit, they recognized that mining is slow — a new rare earth mine can take 10, 15, maybe 30 years to develop, and they've been putting a lot of money into those resources. We do need the rare earths, and some virgin mining is going to be needed. But if we want it tomorrow, we need to use what's already above ground.
What I'm looking at right now — my mobile phone. How many mobile phones do you have in your drawer that are old and you haven't had the heart to abandon yet? That's a fun question to ask at a conference. But that's where our rare earths are. That's where we can get them immediately. Or places like slag from recycling catalytic converters, or steel. When we finally went down there, there aren't that many rare earth recycling startups in the U.S., so the small number wasn't surprising. The idea was: you're tackling this problem from a very different perspective — what do you need to make it happen, and how can we enable that? There were a lot of conversations about funding resources and funding turnaround. The government's slow — it's always been slow, governments all over the world are slow — and it was clear that making sure these support mechanisms could happen in real time was key.
It reminded me of the response to the COVID pandemic, when the government called in all these vaccine startups and said, we've got a national security problem, how do we solve it as quickly as possible? The rare earth issue — not having a secure supply chain, the geopolitical tensions — is in such flux, and a little more existential than COVID-19. But it's a really important problem the U.S. is taking seriously. You've seen a lot more calls come out for organizations, academics, national labs, startups, and industry to tackle the recycling question: how can we capture rare earths from all the unconventional above-ground feedstocks, and do it economically? Because while we might talk about a subsidy or a price floor, at the end of the day we need to do this sustainably, ongoing, without relying on government funds.
A lot of interesting things have played out in the almost-year since that meeting. We've been to a few more workshops, especially with the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, to look at strategies and brainstorm new funding mechanisms. A lot of credit to the U.S. government — it's a little slower than they said it would be; we're still waiting on a grant they told us we'd hear about by the end of January — but we've also seen faster turnaround, and it's improved significantly. It's clear they're serious about building this up. I'm still optimistic. But one critical thing that wasn't discussed in the White House meeting — and in retrospect I think we should have brought up — is the need to collaborate internationally.
The U.S. has voiced this desire to have a domestic supply chain, which is important. But when something is so heavily concentrated in one country like China — resources, the knowledge of how to do this, talent, workforce, the understanding of what it takes to do hydrometallurgy — there's so little of that left in the United States alone that to say we're suddenly going to build a supply chain without that infrastructure across all those sectors is a little myopic. The way to make it happen is to pool resources with Europe, the UK, et cetera, and work together to build out a global ex-China, or at least non-Chinese-dependent, supply chain. Once we have a robust supply chain and a marketplace for rare earths, China absolutely should be part of it — it's just a matter of forcing them to be part of the global supply chain instead of dominating it themselves.
Dustin Olsen (27:43)
I think that's well said, and truly fascinating. It's encouraging to hear they're taking it seriously. We see that too — we're just not part of these exclusive workshops to know what's actually being said. To your point, I've said on this show that the world is too small to do everything on your own. This idea of an international community coming together, sharing resources and talent, is probably the best way forward. On the flip side — if China did this to us, who's to say somebody else won't do it again? Same playbook. So doing as much as we can domestically makes sense. Is it realistic in the short run? Probably not, especially with the talent. We have it, just not a lot of it. We've had several guests say the real knowledge and talent are beyond retirement age — some have come out of retirement for one last hurrah. What does it look like to get college-age citizens interested in this space, in manufacturing, in work that isn't Instagram or AI?
Alexa Schmitz (29:36)
I see the point on international versus domestic, and I want to make a quick comment: it's not necessarily that we can't do it all domestically. You have to think of the supply chain as the value chain — it takes a lot to go from mineral to magnet, with steps along the way that include leaching. Downstream from us, we're selling to rare earth separators; then you metallize it and turn it into magnets. That's a lot to ask for one country to build all at once. So my point is that if you want the full supply chain to be robust, you need to look at who's doing what in other countries. The whole supply chain needs to be solid, instead of just a part here and there.
To get that talent — we talk about it a lot. You've got great geologists all over the world, including in the U.S., in departments that put out fantastic researchers. In terms of the actual technology that goes into mining, I have to credit the retirees who have all that knowledge and are coming back. Maybe it's a last hurrah, but they really care about making sure we can have secure supply chains, and I've tapped into that expertise many times along this journey.
For the newer, younger generation, we see a mixed bag — between inspiration to get the critical metals and make them domestically, but also that rhetoric of "mining is bad." Mining is essential. You want your mobile phone, you want your computers — you need to mine, you need the critical metals. Recycling will never account for the amount we need, because we keep building more and more of these materials into the infrastructure. So it can be tough to talk to the younger generation and convince them to get into mining, and I see that struggle among the companies I talk to.
But what I do know is that at ReeGen, we're producing this very clean leaching solution that could essentially replace mineral acids in the process flow sheets of the mining industry. This is what has allowed us to tap into above-ground feedstocks — we can set up shop right at the feedstock source and not worry about the hazardous waste that comes with conventional critical mineral recovery. A lot of the new talent sees the sustainability and recycling approach and gets excited. I've had some who are less excited when they hear we're still potentially working with mining companies. But ultimately, changing the rhetoric, direction, and impacts of the mining industry as much as possible is probably what it will take to inspire the younger generation to build that workforce.
And I believe that, regardless of the administration, there's a lot of desire for lower impacts — basically because it's cheaper. When you have to deal with shipping sulfuric acid and disposing of really hazardous waste — people can say "forget the environment," but what are you going to do, put it into the drinking water? Nobody wants to pollute drinking water. These are hazardous materials that need to be disposed of, and it's expensive to take care of. If you can use biology to produce biological leaching solutions and replace some of the harmful solvents downstream, you've got less hazardous waste, less shipping of hazardous materials, less disposal, fewer polluted communities — with or without digging up the earth. That's going to make the younger workforce much more amenable to getting into the mining industry and the hydrometallurgical processes that need to be learned.
Dustin Olsen (34:17)
Well said. From my perspective, an outlook like that means your company is headed in a great direction — an advocate for healthy, sustainable solutions we'll all benefit from. On that note, what does the future look like for ReeGen? What are you most excited about as you consider the next year, the next five years?
Alexa Schmitz (34:45)
We've moved fast. Four years ago I honestly hadn't envisioned what this would look like. We've been scaling rapidly. About a year ago we realized that if we want to present a clean alternative to what exists in process flow sheets, we'd need to show it works directly — which means making a product that can go into our customers' process flows themselves. So we pivoted just slightly: taking our leached solution and figuring out how to turn it into a real total rare earth oxide. We developed a low-impact, simple refining process downstream from our leaching, produced a TREO we estimated was above 90%, and worked with a downstream buyer to validate it. Indeed, we're making a total rare earth oxide around 98% rare earths.
That told us we need to make this happen. We've got feedstocks, we've got the slags, we've got partners eager to get rid of this waste — which can be a big liability or pain point, since they have to pay to dispose of it or ship it to somebody. Could we offset some of that expense and rapidly get these rare earths into the supply chain? Those two things combined really get me out of bed in the morning. I'm so excited to start getting rare earths back into the supply chain out of post-consumer goods, and to work with industry partners looking for solutions to real-world problems.
Within the next year, we aim to be on site with our first feedstock partner, converting at least 10 tons of slag per day — a smaller commercial installation — into about 200 to 300 kilograms of rare earth oxides on a daily basis. That's our goal to hit in 2027: about a year from now, having that system set up and running with our first partner, actually selling recycled rare earths back into the supply chain here in the United States. To me that's phenomenal. I'm so excited to get it rolling and show the world that recycled rare earths can be a reality, and that biology has so much to offer in unlocking that access.
Dustin Olsen (37:34)
That's awesome. For anyone interested in getting involved with your work, how can they find you? Where should they reach out?
Alexa Schmitz (37:42)
Great question. My email is alexa@reegen.tech. Alexa — straight off of Amazon's Echo device, but I was first. And ReeGen is R-E-E-G-E-N dot tech. Please reach out. We're actually fundraising pretty actively — I think that's probably my job for the rest of my life now. We're finishing up our smaller round and about to start our large fundraise to move forward with that first commercial deployment. Either way, if you're interested in advisory support, if you're a mining expert and want to discuss more, or if you feel our biological solutions would fit into your process flow sheets, please do reach out. We're excited to see where our technology can fill a gap in sustainable mining and rare earth recovery — and other critical metals as well. I look forward to hearing from anybody who's interested. Thanks so much.
Dustin Olsen (38:45)
Alexa, thank you so much for being on the show and talking about your company, the technology you're using, and your perspective on the industry. It's really helpful and honestly a breath of fresh air to hear there are people who are like-minded and just want to see the best solution, whatever that looks like. Thanks for being here.
Alexa Schmitz (39:09)
Thanks again for having me. I really hope we can all work together. I love what you guys are doing, and everybody on the show is making their dent, making an impact to solve the rare earth crisis we're all facing today. Thanks so much for doing what you do. It was a pleasure.
Dustin Olsen (39:25)
We love it, just like you love what you're doing. We appreciate it, Alexa. Hopefully we'll have you on the show again in the future to get an update on how things are going and what the new horizon might look like.
Alexa Schmitz (39:38)
Looking forward to it. Thanks.
