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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elroy Jetson who wrote (148900)	5/31/2019 5:00:34 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	2 Recommendations Recommended By elmatador pak73 Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 217798

After using a $50,000 grant to test whether useful elements can be extracted from phosphate mining and farming waste, a local environmental firm is declaring success. Fort Lauderdale-based environmental firm Periodic Products said its technology has recovered all 17 rare elements found in the earth, which include materials with names such as scandium, cerium, erbium and terbium. "Periodic Product" has been awarded several U.S. and international patents on its technology. - periodicproducts.com Laurino, a former chemistry professor at the University of Tampa, developed a nontoxic, biodegradable polymer, or chain of molecules, to remove and recover rare earth metals in water. He said Periodic Products' technology was designed not to bind to calcium or sodium, which are typically in found in waste or water, making it difficult to extract rare minerals. "We can pick needles out of the haystack," he said. Laurino initially launched his company in 2009, designing products for cleaning pool water and removing stains. Metals such as copper and iron stain pool walls and hardware and can turn water cloudy. Periodic Products uses a process to recover the rare earth elements in which phosphate waste products are washed with proprietary water-based extraction solutions. The wash solutions are filtered through its proprietary polymers, the company said. Brian Birky, executive director of the institute, said he expected Periodic Products' technology to work and "we're happy it worked as well as it did." Laurino said element extraction could become Florida's next big business as well. "Florida has about one third of the phosphate industry. There's about 30,000 tons of it annually sitting in their waste each year," Laurino said. "It represents a tremendous opportunity for the State of Florida." Birky said, "This inexpensive high-tech approach is a massive improvement over the primitive lakes of acid used in China. China's leaders are simply devastating their country using a backward mining technique. We can produce rare earths at far less cost in an environmentally friendly manner."