Almost 300 million tons in municipal solid waste are created per year. While metals make up around 9 percent of that total, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, they can be some of the most cost-efficient materials to recycle. Less energy is used when recycling both ferrous (steel, iron, titanium) and non-ferrous metals (aluminum, copper, tin) compared to mining metal ores. Plus there's money to be made, especially with non-ferrous metals. However, the recycling industry is currently leaving some of that money on the table.

"The recycling industry is often overlooked, it has huge volumes, but for lack of a better term, it's a scrappy industry," said Dr. Josh Werner, inventor of the green metals recycling process and assistant professor of mining engineering at the University of Kentucky. "We started seeing advanced needs for applying technology into areas where it typically has not been applied. Because recyclers are niche, they're often family-owned, and there's very interesting market dynamics."

The process of mining and extracting these metals from natural mineral deposits in the Earth are costly, require a lot of energy, and are not environmentally friendly. Even some of the current metal recycling techniques require the use of extreme heat or caustic chemicals. And not every recycling facility is equipped to handle it.

Knowing the hardships, Dr. Werner teamed up with a colleague from his days at Honeywell, Kevin Hubert, to work on a solution. Together, they've tested a technology that will allow metal recycling in an easy, non-environmentally damaging way, and is cost-efficient.

"A big portion of what we're trying to do is to take materials that go directly into the landfill or require environmentally unfriendly techniques (to mine and recycle)—either acids or melting and smelting," said Kevin Hubert, who spent more than a decade as an engineer at Honeywell.

"A lot of the material that we're planning on taking on are materials that will be landfilled otherwise, so the metals will be lost. We're going to do it economically as well. So, it's not just an environmental benefit, there's actually a profitability component that we can also give to whomever is going to take on the technology," he said.

Dr. Werner explained that going through the UAccel and NSF I-Corps National accelerators helped them refine the initial road map for the technology. Speaking with customers and those on the ground at recycling facilities and scrap yards, they learned a big concern was extracting copper, a valuable metal.

"The customers are throwing away stuff that they know has value. That's the hard part. Literally, there's money and you can't get it out," Hubert said.

"We're not using acids, we're not using cyanides, we're not burning anything," Dr. Werner added. "A lot of the reagents (we use) you can use in fertilizer."

Currently, they're working on developing the technology for scale up and talking to potential partners in the industry to help them move forward. While they've focused on specific metals like copper, aluminum, and iron, the plan is to eventually work on other types of metals and become an all-in-one solution for metal recycling, something they predict will disrupt the recycling industry.

"When recycling became a thing in the '60s and '70s, when there was money to be made, the environment was not a concern. Smelting, acid-based extraction—a scorched earth policy really. As long as you could get money that was the big thing. It really hasn't progressed much. The process hasn't really changed," Hubert said.

"We believe that this is disruptive. It's a completely different chemistry. It takes a lot of the energy equation out of a lot of the emissions. The beauty is that if you come from a very highly regulated environment, like the United States, we believe we can get this permitted in many areas that otherwise wouldn't allow this type of recycling."

By: Erin Shea

Launch Blue nurtures promising startup founders and university innovators through intensive accelerator and incubator programs. Its funding partners are the University of Kentucky: Office of Technology Commercialization, KY Innovation, the U.S. Economic Development Administration, and the National Science Foundation.