Eric Schelter

Eric Schelter, associate professor of chemistry in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and his research group, recently won the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2017 Green Chemistry Challenge Award. Dr. Schelter and colleagues were chosen for developing a simple, fast and low-cost technology to help recycle rare-earth materials.

 The US uses about 17,000 metric tons of rare-earth every year in products such as wind turbines, lighting phosphors, electric motors, batteries and cell phones. The mining, refining and purification of these materials can have a negative impact on the environment, yet only 1% of materials are recycled.

“Metals never burn out,” Dr. Schelter said. “They’re elements. So in principle you can extract them out of post-consumer products and use them again, but there really just isn’t very good chemistry that enables us to do that. Currently with the framework that exists in industry, it’s cheaper to just get things from primary sources: from mining new elements from the ground and then just using them and throwing them away.”

Dr. Schelter is working in his lab to extract the valuable materials from post-consumer products like permanent magnets and lighting phosphors, and enable “circular economies” for their reuse while minimizing added cost and pollution.