REEcover

REEcover was born in 2023 in a research lab at ETH Zurich, in the scenery of the Swiss mountains which you can see from the ETH Hönggerberg campus. While Marie’s PhD projects revolved around the deeper understanding of rare earth coordination chemistry for diverse applications, reading the book “The Rare Metals War: the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies” by the French journalist Guillaume Pitron really opened her mind to the hidden challenges faced to meet our current sustainable development goals.

The recycling of rare earth elements (REEs) was lacking both innovations and incentives from policy makers to prevent the mining of natural ores. Only recently has this topic been addressed by international organizations, with both the International Energy Agency and International Renewable Energy Agency releasing reports on critical metals in 2022. 2023 was a critical year for critical materials, with the European Critical Raw Material Act adopted in March by the European Commission. With these incentives at play, the timing to implement a novel recycling process could not be more perfect. At REEcover, we take advantage of a unique patented technology which allows us to recover these elements from electronic waste. Our first proof of concept concerns the recycling of Europium and Yttrium from energy saving lamps, with a separation factor 10 times superior to existing technologies. We want to take advantage of the well-established recycling scheme to decrease this dependance on minerals which are mined thousands of kilometers away. We are currently developing our process to scale up the recycling and extend it to different REEs, such as Neodymium and Dysprosium which are found in magnets, while keeping as our north star sustainability and circularity.