Materials of tomorrow to recycle materials of today

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Every day, tons of potentially valuable materials are discarded in various waste streams simply because recycling them is more expensive than their recoverable value. Considering that finite resources such as precious metals are among these wastes, the opportunity appears obvious. 

Wendy Lee Queen, and American expat and passionate baseball player, leads the Laboratory for Functional Inorganic Materials at the EPFL in Lausanne, and has a potential solution. She is one of the leading experts of metal organic frameworks (MOF) and a pioneer of novel composite materials where MOFs and polymers in bead form provide an innovative way to fine tune affinity and selectivity for various chemical species of interest. These can be used to efficiently capture pollutants such as carbon dioxide, but also to recover valuable resources from water waste streams, such as precious metals.

Wendy’s research is a beautiful story of chemical innovation, where ground-breaking chemistry makes new things possible. And when these new things have the potential to change the way we look at our urban and industrial wastes, this is a moment chemistry is brought to life.

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