Microbially Supported Recovery of Precious Metals and Rare Earth Elements from Urban Household Waste Incineration Slag

摘要

The use of precious metals and Rare Earth Elements in electronic, medical, and automobile industries is drastically increasing. To meet this demand and to escape the financial pressure of the global metal market, not only mining activities but recently also the recovery of these elements from industrial and urban household waste is in the focus of research. It has been shown that the application of extracting solutions with pH values lower than 4 lead to an economically feasible recovery of industrially precious metals. It is unclear, however, whether and to which extent this abiotic extraction efficiency can potentially be increased by using microorganisms capable of dissolving more stable minerals at low pH. The goal of this project therefore is to first view urban household waste as a resource for metals and evaluate combined abiotic and biotic extraction procedures for an increase in metal extraction efficiency.