Goals to sustainably feed a growing population with limited land resources are driving massive efforts to develop new food sources Today, it is common to see plant-based “meat” products on the shelves of grocery stores. Although soy-based meat products have…
LG Chem Ltd. (Seoul, South Korea) supplied reverse osmosis (RO) membranes to China’s largest salt-lake lithium extraction project. The company has shipped more than 10,000 RO membranes to the Guoan lithium extraction project led by CITIC Group, China’s largest state-owned…
Processes that capture carbon dioxide from industrial fluegas and simultaneously convert it into useful chemicals are desirable because they offer an opportunity to produce CO2-derived chemicals more efficiently and economically than conventional approaches, where costs are driven up by the…
Recovering valuable metals, such as cobalt and nickel, from used lithium-ion batteries is emerging as a key capability because of anticipated high battery demand and material shortages. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, Calif.; www.lbl.gov) have developed a technology…
Fractional crystallization is a stage-wise separation technique that relies upon the liquid-solid phase change and enables the purification of multi-component mixtures, as long as none of the constituents can act as a solvent to the others. Thanks to the level…
Evonik Industries AG (Essen, Germany) has started up a new hollow-fiber spinning plant for the production of gas separation membranes in Schörfling am Attersee in Austria. The new production capacity enables the company to meet the ongoing strong demand for…
Production of ammonia by the Haber-Bosch process not only requires a lot of energy for the high-temperature (300–500°C) synthesis of NH3 itself, but the recovery of ammonia takes place by condensation at –20°C. As a result, large changes in both…
Bauxite residue (red mud) is a byproduct from the smelting of aluminum. Like other waste slags from the metallurgy industry, bauxite residue is traditionally put into hazardous-waste landfills, although it contains a mixture of valuable raw materials in low concentrations.…
A new recycling process has been developed for scrap polypropylene (PP), a waste stream that is currently underserved by many plastics-recycling facilities. The process, developed by PureCycle (Orlando, Fla.; www.purecycle.com), aims to “wash the plastic molecules” using a series of…
A new electrowinning process is being field-trialed at the Prieska copper-zinc mine operated by Orion Minerals Ltd. (Melbourne, Australia; www.orionminerals.com.au) in South Africa, which will enable the production of valuable products, including calcium, magnesium, iron and others, from contaminated mine…