Rare earth elements recovery using elastin like polypeptide fused with lanmodulin from fly ash

Abstract

Due to increasing significance of rare earth elements (REEs) in modern era for environment friendly and high tech technologies, there’s a tremendous demand for REEs recovery from the wastes in a sustainable way to avoid the environmental burden. In this regard, REEextractor technology was developed by Zohaib Hussain for capturing REEs using elastin like polypeptide fused with Lanmodulin (RELP) in pH responsive manner. In this study, fly ash which is a by product of coal incineration in a coal thermal plant, is utilized for the REEs recovery about 98% total REEs recovery at ph 4.02 and 5.7 with minimal Cu recovery. Moreover, the enrichment of REEs was also briefly investigated. Therefore, REEextractor has a great potential to recover and enrich REEs from various types of industrial and electronic wastes.