Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

German scientists devise ‘phytomining’ technique to extract rare metals from plants

Kelly Hodgkins
By

germanium mining plants plantscan
Humans have been extracting useful materials from plants for millennia, but in the past few years, we’ve gotten particularly good at it. Case in point? German scientists from Freiburg University of Mining and Technology have discovered a way to mine plants for chemicals that can be used for manufacturing and industrial purposes. Biology professor Hermann Heilmeier and industrial chemistry Professor Martin Bertau are spearheading this technique they call “phytomining.” Working together at Freiburg U, the pair have developed a method to harvest germanium, an important metalloid component used in computers, smartphones and fiber-optic cables.

Germanium is found in soils worldwide, but it is hard to mine since it must be extracted from zinc, silver, lead or copper ore. More than 100 tons of germanium are produced annually with China producing the bulk of the global supply. Approximately 35 percent of worldwide germanium comes from recycling efforts that recoup the metal from existing sources. Heilmeier has found a way to circumvent these time-consuming extraction and recycling procedures using nature’s own concentrator, the plant.

Related Videos

Heilmeier grows his plants in a germanium-rich water that is available in waste rock piles at mines. The plants uptake this germanium-laden water and create a natural reserve of the element using the plant’s normal physiological processes. The plants are then harvested and the germanium recovered from the biomass using bacterial fermentation.

Related

To make the process even more economical, the researchers are piggybacking on top of existing biogas plants that grow plants for energy. By growing these energy plants in germanium-rich water, the team creates an affordable source of germanium that can be mined easily after the plants have been used for energy generation. The bulk of the cost of growing and harvesting the plants is covered by the biogas plants, which already are growing the plants for fuel.  The final step of germanium recovery  is relatively cheap, making germanium phytomining a cost-effective technique.

As it is with most new procedures, there are many hurdles to overcome. For the germanium researchers, they must overcome low yield. Right now, germanium is harvested in minuscule quantities, just a few milligrams of germanium per liter.  The team hopes to upscale this process to an industry level where they are working with apparatus capable of handling a 1,000 liters of plant material at a time and producing yields of at least one gram of germanium per liter.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
This clever new technique could help us map the ocean floor — from the sky
pass ocean mapping stanford airbornesonarconcept

A friend of mine who works in games design recently showed me a 3D model of the Earth, rendered in great detail using topographically accurate satellite data, so that we could soar through canyons and our respective neighborhoods at high speed like a pair of joyriding Supermen. “Let’s see if we can go underwater,” he said, exhilarated, as we flew out over the Pacific.

We couldn’t. The model, so stunningly accurate on land, apparently had zero data with which to model the undersea environment. It was an unrendered void beneath the water’s glassy surface, as if this was some subaquatic version of The Truman Show, and we had reached the end of the world.

Read more
Scientists hail first unambiguous detection of water on the moon
lifeship dna archive on the moon silhouette unsplash

SOFIA Discovers Water on a Sunlit Surface of the Moon

NASA has confirmed the presence of water on the moon in a breakthrough discovery that could have implications for future human space exploration.

Read more
VR lets scientists shrink down and ‘walk around’ inside their own cells
VR look inside cells.

In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, a U.S. submarine and its crew are shrunk down to microscopic size and injected into the body of a comatose Soviet doctor who has defected to the U.S., in an effort to destroy a blood clot in his brain that threatens his life. Since then, the idea of being able to shrink people down to microscale, often to solve some kind of medical challenge, has made its way into various parts of popular culture. But not, as of yet, into reality.

Sadly, scientists and engineers still have yet to develop a real-life shrink ray. But investigators from the U.K.’s University of Cambridge and 3D image analysis software company Lume VR have come up with a method that uses virtual reality to allow researchers to “walk around” inside individual cells in order to better understand some fundamental problems in biology and, in the process, learn to develop better treatments.

Read more