This article offers a detailed examination of 10 new metal recovery solutions pioneering technologies in areas such as copper extraction, sustainable metal production, and mineral lithium extraction. They are also advancing sustainable metal extraction, precious metal recovery, and novel sustainable alternatives.
Each company profiled here is making significant strides in enhancing efficiency and sustainability within the sector, underscoring the broad and growing impact of these technologies in the field. Continue reading to gain up-to-date and data-driven insights on:
- Profiles of 10 Emerging Metal Recovery Solutions
- How to Scout the Best Metal Recovery Solutions Easily
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Key Takeaways
Drawing insights from the Big Data & AI-powered StartUs Insights Discovery Platform that provides data on over 4.7+ million emerging companies globally, we explore the evolving landscape of the metal recovery industry. This sector is marked by key trends and a substantial workforce, shaping its future. This article was last updated 5 days ago. If you find any info is missing, let us know! Here are some key insights at a glance:
- Current Metal Recovery Trends: Some of the major trends impacting the metal recovery industry are electrochemical recovery, sulfurization-reduction, metal slag recovery, waste valorization, and resource efficiency.
- Metal Recovery Industry Statistics: The sector comprises 11.3K+ organizations worldwide. On average, it employs about 14 people in 620+ new companies founded in the last five years, witnessing 2020 as the average founding year. Moreover, the average funding received by the metal recovery industry per round in the same span is USD 17.6 million.
- 10 New Metal Recovery Companies to Watch:
- Seloxium – Extracting Metals From Wastewater
- Elmery – Electrochemical Precious Metal Extraction
- Still Bright – Copper Extraction
- Element Zero – Sustainable Metal Production
- Minerva Lithium – Mineral Lithium Extraction
- pH7 Technologies – Sustainable Metal Extraction
- ThioTech – Precious Metal Recovery
- Igneo – Sustainable Mining
- Two Planet Steel – Zero Emissions Steel
- Renewable Metals – Critical Minerals Recovery
Meet 10 out of 620+ Emerging Metal Recovery Solutions
In this section, we highlight 10 top metal recovery companies addressing key industry needs with innovative solutions. These firms focus on copper extraction, sustainable metal production, and lithium extraction. They also advance low-carbon sustainable extraction of metals as sustainable alternatives to conventional mining. Their expertise extends to metals and minerals processing and recycling to boost efficiency and sustainability. Explore the significant contributions and advancements these entities bring to the metal recovery industry.
Note on Signal Strength
One of the unique metrics we feature for each company is Signal Strength, a proprietary data point generated by our Discovery Platform. It gauges the extent to which a company’s influence has permeated the global ecosystem of startups, scaleups, and emerging companies. This proprietary metric serves as a valuable guidepost for understanding a company’s standing in the broader market landscape.
1. Seloxium
- Founding Year: 2022
- Employee Range: 2-10
- Location: UK
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: Seloxium develops Selectal, a patented selective flocculation technology for metal recovery. This technology enables the efficient extraction and purification of valuable metals from wastewater. Selectal supports different concentration ranges, from dilute to concentrated solutions, while ensuring high selectivity and speed compared to traditional methods. It also features a low-energy operation based on mixing, flocculation, and filtration, making it an environmentally friendly option. Selectal thus finds applications in nickel and silver mining and refining as well as recovers trace amounts of palladium from industrial waste.
2. Elmery
- Founding Year: 2022
- Employee Range: 2-10
- Location: Finland
- Signal Strength: Strong
- What they do: Elmery offers a patented metal recovery technology that enhances circulation and cost-efficiency for metal refineries. This technology improves resource capacity and circulation. The company’s offerings include selective extraction of precious metals like platinum and palladium. Additionally, it provides impurity removal services by targeting contaminants, like tellurium and selenium, to reduce waste and increase process efficiency. Elmery’s technology thus significantly improves metal recovery for refineries.
3. Still Bright
- Founding Year: 2022
- Employee Range: 2-10
- Location: USA
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: Still Bright provides a hydrometallurgical process for the rapid and clean recovery of copper using electrochemical technology. This process significantly reduces the environmental footprint of copper production and costs by relying on renewable energy. It also enables rapid conversion of concentrated copper ore into refined copper at room temperature and pressure. As a result, refineries are able to produce large quantities of copper while reducing dependency on smelting.
4. Element Zero
- Founding Year: 2022
- Employee Range: 11-50
- Location: Australia
- Signal Strength: Medium Strong
- What they do: Element Zero makes a mineral processing platform. It cost-effectively and efficiently converts metal ores, such as iron, nickel, and silicon, into their pure forms with zero carbon emissions. This non-aqueous electrochemical process is also powered by renewable energy and supports the conversion of a variety of ores. Further, the technology achieves high selectivity and energy efficiency while producing high-purity materials and capturing by-products like silica and alumina. Moreover, the company utilizes cost-effective materials to increase scalability and reduce capital expenditures. The process benefits iron ore suppliers and energy metal industries by offering a sustainable production method.
5. Minerva Lithium
- Founding Year: 2020
- Employee Range: 2-10
- Location: USA
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: Minerva Lithium extracts critical materials using a nano mosaic membrane filter system. This allows for the selective extraction of lithium from brine resources and the production of pure lithium carbonate and lithium chloride required for battery components. The company also provides solutions for water purification and heavy metal extraction to improve environmental remediation efforts. Minerva Lithium benefits water companies, brine developers, and filtration operators with its advanced lithium recovery and water treatment technologies.
6. pH7 Technologies
- Founding Year: 2020
- Employee Range: 11-50
- Location: Canada
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: pH7 Technologies focuses on solvometallurgy to sustainably extract and refine metals critical for the transition to renewable energy. Its non-aqueous solvent solution facilitates selective metal extraction from ores, concentrates, and wastes. pH7 Technologies’ solution also significantly reduces CO2 emissions, energy usage, and water consumption while eliminating toxic chemicals.
7. ThioTech
- Founding Year: 2021
- Employee Range: 2-10
- Location: UK
- Signal Strength: Medium
- What they do: ThioTech develops novel materials for the recovery of waste mercury and gold. This technology utilizes elemental sulfur, a by-product of the oil-refining process, to produce sulfur polymers, sulfur polymer coatings, and activated sulfur carbons. These materials remove soft metal ions like mercury and gold from solutions to nearly undetectable levels. ThioTech’s sulfur-based materials also operate across a range of concentrations. This eliminates the usual trade-offs between selectivity, cost, and capacity in metal ion removal. Industries that benefit from ThioTech’s innovations include environmental remediation and precious metals recovery sectors.
8. Igneo
- Founding Year: 2021
- Employee Range: 11-50
- Location: USA
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: Igneo offers a patented technology that converts e-scrap into high-grade metal concentrates, focusing on precious metals like copper, gold, palladium, and silver. This technology separates these metals from plastics and resins as well as removes harmful emissions to produce sustainable copper concentrates and ensure a high recovery rate. This process reduces landfill waste and offers a sustainable solution to meet the growing e-scrap challenge. Moreover, this technology integrates with traditional smelting processes to ensure the reutilization of extracted metals as raw materials.
9. Two Planet Steel
- Founding Year: 2019
- Employee Range: 2-10
- Location: USA
- Signal Strength: Strong
- What they do: Two Planet Steel uses its Fast Iron Carbonylation (FIC) technology for metal recovery. It extracts iron and nickel from metal-rich feedstocks like high-iron content ores and recycled materials. This offers a zero-emissions method to produce metal powders for diverse applications, such as 3D metal printing, battery production, and steel manufacturing. FIC also produces residues containing critical minerals. Two Planet Steel’s solution lowers the cost of metal powders and benefits industries like powder metallurgy and advanced manufacturing.
10. Renewable Metals
- Founding Year: 2020
- Employee Range: 2-10
- Location: Australia
- Signal Strength: Very Strong
- What they do: Renewable Metals offers an alkali recycling process that recovers critical minerals from end-of-life lithium batteries. This process reclaims lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese from batteries without pre-processing into black mass. It also features high recovery rates and cost-effectiveness due to fewer processing steps and the use of leach recycling. Additionally, the process operates at low temperatures and does not generate sodium sulfate or other chemically precipitated by-products.
Quick Tip to Find New Metal Recovery Solutions
Utilizing a SaaS platform like the Discovery Platform for identifying new metal recovery solutions provides significant benefits compared to traditional scouting methods:
- Streamlined Efficiency: The Discovery Platform offers advanced tools that streamline the scouting process. It replaces hours of your conventional desk research, saving time and resources in identifying metal recovery innovations.
- Access to Real-time Insights: Gain a competitive edge with up-to-date information on the latest trends in the metal recovery industry. The platform keeps you informed with near real-time updates on emerging metal recovery solutions and news, enabling you to make swift and informed decisions.
- Tailored Exploration: Customize your search to focus on specific niches within the metal recovery sector, such as electrochemical extraction of precious metals, copper extraction, or sustainable metal production,. The platform’s diverse filtering options allow you to target your scouting efforts precisely, ensuring that you find the most relevant and groundbreaking companies in the field.
Ready to Explore All New Metal Recovery Solutions?
This overview highlights just a few solutions from all 620+ new metal recovery companies currently covered by the Discovery Platform. To explore them all, book a personalized demo or download one of our free Industry Innovation Reports for a quick overview. Interested in enhancing our coverage of startups and tech? We value insights from experts like you – reach out!
