RCM NEWS & UPDATES

The early Story of Reclaiming Critical Metals

Four older adults, three women and one man, stand together outside in a snowy, wooded area. One woman wears a yellow coat, another a green coat, the man wears a black jacket, and the third woman wears a black coat. All are smiling.

Share this Article

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). 

Two women stand on stage under a spotlight. The woman on the left speaks with a headset and gestures with her hands, while the woman on the right listens attentively, wearing glasses and a colorful scarf.
Three people sit around a wooden table covered with papers, pens, and water bottles, working on laptops. The room has green walls, wooden doors, and a glass-fronted cabinet in the background.
A woman wearing glasses and a blue plaid shirt looks through a microscope in a laboratory setting.
A woman with long, dark, wavy hair smiles at the camera. She is outdoors with a blurred background and is wearing a dark-colored top.

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.