One Person’s Trash is Another Person’s Treasure
Sept. 1, 2021
In April 2021, the University of Arizona partnered with the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) to establish the France-Arizona Institute for Global Grand Challenges.
Through this newly established partnership, Dr. Alicja Babst-Kostecka and Dr. Raina Maier from the University of Arizona Superfund Research Center (UA SRC, Project 5), just received funds to investigate a plant-based solution for the removal and re-use of metal(loids) from dryland ecosystems. Dr. Claude Grison (ChimEco Director) and Dr. Yves-Marie Legrand (ChimEco Research Engineer) are the two other investigators from France.
The title of this project is: “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure – optimizing metal-contaminated plant biomass towards the needs of Green Chemistry”. This is a 3-year project and started in Aug 2021.
This project will investigate the development of an effective two-step plant-based solution for the removal and re-use of metal(loids) from dryland ecosystems.
First, metal capture will be optimized for removal from soil using desert-adapted plants that (hyper)accumulate metals in their leaves. Second, this team of researchers will harvest the resulting polymetallic plant biomass and use the recovered metals to develop a new generation of economically valuable “eco”-catalysts. Catalysts speed up chemical reactions and are the backbone of many industrial processes that turn raw materials into useful products.
The proposed innovative approach of this project has the potential to remediate metal-contaminated soils sustainably and profitably.