Considerations about recovery of critical metals using bio-metallurgy

Abstract

Abstract. The increased requirement of critical metals due to green technologies needs, together with the geopolitical environment to ensure these metals, has entailed decisive measures to avoid current supply insecurities in each country. These metals are essential to the products and services made and used daily, and contribute to sustaining and growing the economy. Thus, sustainable approaches from technological, environmental, economic and social point of view are needed to recover these metals from different resources. By using resources more efficiently, innovating in the concept of circular economy, it can be assure re-using, re-manufacturing or recycling of valuable materials. In this paper are presented some considerations related to using the waste dumps as potential resources to obtain critical metals by biometallurgical processes.

Extremophiles, a Nifty Tool to Face Environmental Pollution: From Exploitation of Metabolism to Genome Engineering

“…The possibility to combine metal biorecovery with bioremediation represents an intriguing challenge to reduce process costs: microorganisms can recover metals from polluted sites, contemporarily reducing pollution, and producing valuable elements [ 62 ]. The microbial pathways that can be exploited to remove toxic metals from an environment are those related to biosorption/bioaccumulation; they consist into the ability of microorganisms to sequester heavy metals on the cell surface or intracellularly.…”