Treasure from trash: Mining critical metals from waste and unconventional sources

To meet future technological demands of our growing global community new sources of industry critical metals need to be identified. To meet these demands, extracting minerals from larger, lower grade deposits across most commodities is required, which in turn generates ever increasing amounts of mine wastes. We propose that agromining could be used to enables access to unconventional resources not viable using existing minerals processing techniques. This innovative technique relies on so-called hyperaccumulator plants to bio-concentrate high levels of metals into living biomass which can then be extracted from the harvested bio-ore. Producing critical metals, such as nickel, cobalt and thallium, efficiently and sustainably using agromining appears to be well within reach, but this technology needs industrial champions to develop demonstration sites that are scaled appropiately in areas where it is feasible.