Environmentally benign solvent free extraction of rare earth elements from leach solutions.

Important results from the project

Chromafora and MEAB Metallextraktion AB started a project together with Vinnova to develop an environmentally friendly, solvent-free separation of metals, especially the very difficult separations between rare earth metals. The principle of solvent-free separation of rare earth metals worked as expected and was demonstrated on waste from fluorescent lamps and low energy lamps, where our technology was shown to successfully extract rare earth metals. The field of metal separation operations today employs 5 people full time at Chromafora.

Expected long term effects

The project of environmentally friendly solvent-free extraction of rare earth metals from leach solutions has been found to work as expected, there is now a new principle for separating rare earth metals without large solvent extraction plants. The expected effect of this is that Chromafora will be able to build smaller, more environmentally friendly plants that are capable of handling a wide variety of materials, such as recycling from materials in the waste industry. Work on implementing the full-scale technology is currently underway at Chromafora.

Approach and implementation

The plan was that Chromafora as project manager and the innovation company behind the idea, together with materials and advice from MEAB Metallextraktion AB, would create a new technology for metal separations and verify this. The project has technically functioned very well but has had some delays due to difficulty obtaining the quantity of materials and the type of equipment required to deal with difficult materials such as crushed fluorescent lamps in aggressive liquids. But once everything arrived, the project has met its technical and business goals beyond expectations.