Marie Perrin - REEcover

The urgent energy transition needed to mitigate climate change relies heavily on critical metals, particularly REEs which are essential in many technologies, from smartphones and computers to wind turbines and electric vehicles. REEcover’s mission is to create a positive impact by building a circular and sustainable supply chain of Rare Earth Elements (REEs). The problem we are solving dual: as the demand for REEs is expected to skyrocket in the coming years, our reliance on the mining industry alone poses critical geopolitical and environmental challenges, and at the same time the world is grappling with an ever-growing amount of waste. REEcover addresses both issues by recovering REEs from key waste streams, when currently less than 1% of REEs are being recycled world-wide. Our pioneering approach leverages an innovative separation process to recover valuable REEs. Born in the research lab of Prof. Victor Mougel at ETH Zurich, the patented technology developed during Marie’s PhD will initially focuse on recycling europium and yttrium from spent energy-saving lamps. This process, with a current Technology Readiness Level of 5 (TRL5) allows to recover europium in over 90% purity and 99% recovery efficiency in a single step with no pre-treatment of the waste and separation factors with yttrium 100 times higher than currently used industrial processes.