Critical Materials
Securing technology-critical metals
The world’s demand for raw materials is under increasing pressure, with global demand expected to double by 2060. Critical elements such as cobalt, lithium, and rare-earth metals are vital to many industrial sectors and technologies, such as smartphones and wind turbines, despite often being present in only relatively small quantities.
Supply restrictions exacerbate the challenge. Low natural abundance in the earth’s crust, deliberate restrictions from dominant producers, low recycling rates and environmentally damaging processes all contribute to the increasing pressure to meet our needs.
At Birmingham, we are developing new recycling processes to recover critical materials from end-of-life products, mining wastes, and even road dust and developing techniques to use these materials more efficiently. We've developed novel technologies that allow us to recover very small concentrations of critical elements from wastes at concentrations as low as 5 parts per million.
The problems encountered by strategic and critical materials are often driven by economic or political factors, so our research considers the whole system, from technology to business models and geopolitics and a Birmingham Policy Commission has secured support for our recommendations to the government to ensure the UK supply chain can meet our ambitions for a clean future.
Alongside the technologies and equipment we have developed at Birmingham is a wealth of industry and research expertise, vital to developing processes to ensure a sustainable supply of critical materials and reduce dependency on virgin mined metals.
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