Reducing hazardous material and environmental impact through recycling of scandium nanomaterial waste

The emerging use of scandium and the environmental impact from scandium-containing waste is a rising environmental and health concern. With the development of new materials in the last decade, toxicological studies on those new materials have also been increasing. An example of a process which employs scandium is the generation of metallic nitride fullerene nanomaterials. This process typically generates 99+% scandium waste, as only small amounts of scandium are actually incorporated into the target fullerene molecules. We demonstrate a safe method to recover the scandium content in the waste, reuse the recovered material and successfully demonstrate a comparable product distribution without detectable health and environmental concerns.