We met so many fascinating folks at our booth at the 2026 Iron Range Earth Fest this spring!  And, based on all the email sign-ups that day for news from Reclaiming Critical Metals, we started this blog to share updates on our progress. If you’re not familiar with how we got started, you can read our first blog entry from May for a brief history. We’ve been working on this idea, now reality, since 2021.

Most recently, we’ve been looking at potential sites for our operation. We are committed to locating on the Range, so we’ve been talking with the IRRR and area cities to see what they have available. Nothing quite perfect yet, but we’re getting closer. We will need about 5 acres with paved highway access and utilities. And, on the Range, we’ve found we must be careful not to fall in love with a place that is scheduled to be mined.

We also spent a huge amount of time and effort applying for a “Statewide Recycling Market Development Grant” from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. A little background might help explain why. Our operation will purchase shredded circuit boards from certified area recycling businesses. Ninety percent of shredded e-waste in the U.S. is shipped overseas for smelting. We’ll provide an alternative, saving thousands of miles and months in time.  We will process shredded boards in two ways: we’ll use mechanical separation on 95% of the feedstock, yielding streams of critical metals needed by U.S. manufacturers, and we’ll use a new bio-inspired method that we’re developing to process the last 5% yielding precious metals. The intense research required to develop and patent a new bio-inspired method for that final processing is the project we submitted to the MPCA.

Meanwhile, we sent samples of our future feedstock to weeeSwiss, the Zurich-based company that is modifying their innovative equipment for our needs. (In Europe, the term for e-waste is weee, “waste electronics and electrical equipment.”) They will adapt a processing module that they currently use to meet our feedstock (shredded circuit boards) specifications. In about three months, we should have all the engineering specifications, facility size, through-put data, and financial projections necessary for us to take the next step—financing the building of the factory. Like some but not all other e-waste recycling businesses, we will have our own lab both to assess the metals content of our feedstock and to implement the bio-inspired method.

Bio-inspired is a term we’re using to refer to biomimicry which studies how nature accomplishes tasks and then emulates the natural process in technology, essentially mimicking biology. Did you know that Velcro is an example of biomimicry?  And the shape of wind turbine blades?  If this makes you curious, check out https://biomimicry.net/ for more examples. We’ll be mimicking one of nature’s processes and building a technology to do what nature does so efficiently. More on this as we dive deeper into the research we’ve already started!

Thank you for your interest in our progress. Stay tuned for more blog entries, you’ll receive an email notification when there’s a new update to check out.

In the fall of 2021, Dr. Roopali Phadke,  of Macalester College met with the board of the Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability to discuss her sabbatical work on the future of mining.  She emphasized e-waste recycling as a key method to obtain necessary critical metals for the U.S. Marlise Riffel attended that meeting and came away inspired to initiate discussion around recycling e-waste.  She recalled an earlier presentation on biomimicry by Sue Okerstrom, and, in late 2021, talked with Sue about Dr. Phadke’s work and IRPS’ interest in e-waste recycling. In January 2022, Marlise called State Senate candidate Keith Steva and asked if he had considered promoting e-waste recycling jobs for the Range as part of his senate campaign. That call led to months of research by Keith and Marlise on the quantity and metal content of e-waste in Minnesota.  Sue Okerstrom did another presentation on hyperaccumulators that spring and Marlise talked with her again about IRPS efforts to learn about and encourage e-waste recycling. That spring, IRPS featured Dr. Phadke as keynote speaker at the Iron Range Earth Fest 2022 and we all felt energized. By June, Keith and Marlise had a draft ready to send Dr. Phadke.  She forwarded it to Maria Jensen, then the Environmental Health & Safety Manager for Repowered, a Twin Cities e-waste recycling company.  As a result, Marlise, Keith and Maria met in June 2022 and decided to refine Keith and Marlise’s research based on Maria’s recycling business expertise. The three worked by Zoom until late October when they met at Maria’s apartment in Minneapolis to begin drafting the results. Dr. Phadke provided feedback along the way and participated in the final drafting in the spring of 2023.  With Macalester’s help, these four folks published the study “The Economic Impact of E-waste Recycling in Minnesota: A Pilot Study” on the Iron Range Partnership for Sustainability website (www.irpsmn.org/ewaste-recycling). 

At the same time, fall of 2021, Lichen Labs owner/researcher Sue Okerstrom was testing a hyperaccumulator plant as a biological method for reclaiming critical metals from mine waste. In 2015, Sue had earned a master’s degree in Biomimicry from Arizona State University, part of the first cohort in the world. In 2021, she and two colleagues were competing in the month-long Google Biodesign Sprint Challenge, proposing this hyperaccumulator’s ability. Their team was selected as one of the top 4 of 150 teams from 15 countries that applied. Marlise’s had approached Sue and Angelique Frederiksen about IRPS efforts just after that in late 2021. at the church they all attended. This began a long email correspondence and Zoom meetings sharing research and progress. Marlise and Maria presented a TEDX talk in Virginia, Minnesota, in February 2023 titled “Taking the Lead in E-Mining,” promoting the Iron Range as a perfect site for this innovative effort.  In 2024, Sue, Angelique, Marlise, Maria and Keith worked with “Team Lichen Labs” to compete for a US Department of Energy E-Scrap Prize. The E-Scrap Prize promoted innovative approaches to “reduce the costs and environmental impact of critical material recovery from e-scrap.” The technical innovation we submitted was the bio-utilization and ultimate biomimicry of heavy metal hyperaccumulators in nature to reclaim metals from electronic waste and other sources in an environmentally safe and cost-effective way. We had confirmed that we met the qualifications of application with proof of concept at the bench level. But unfortunately, were not one of the prize winners. When we met in early 2025 to decide how to proceed, we decided to incorporate and Reclaiming Critical Metals was born. We spent months researching innovative alternatives to smelting e-waste, the most common method for recovering metals. And we leaned on Sue to teach us how biomimicry takes a natural process and mimics it technologically. We knew that we wanted to apply a safe, biomimetic method that we could patent to some of the most hard-to-process e-waste (about 5%). And we wanted an environmentally sound separation method for the other 95%. We found weeeSwiss, part of the European Stadler Group, manufacturer of mechanical separation equipment, and began meeting with them about our business model and their machinery. Our business model was not the usual recycling collector-dismantler-shredding-ship overseas for smelting model. We proposed to purchase already shredded e-waste from certified Midwest recyclers and process it from that state to resalable metals without smelting or toxic processes.  We toured four Midwest recyclers and identified our “feedstock.” And we worked with the Small Business Development Center to craft a business plan.  In April 2026, we signed a contract with weeeSwiss to conduct a comprehensive feasibility study and modify their equipment to meet our needs.  As of this writing (May 2026), we are in the middle of that process.  It will conclude with a 3-D design for our factory, all related requirements including staffing, financials including ROI, and site considerations.