G8-2012 Catalysing the Growth in Metal Recovery (PHYTOCAT)

气候变化和石油峰值危机日益成为头条新闻，人们正在寻求减少对石油依赖的解决方案。随着新技术解决了一个挑战，我们正在通过资源短缺制造另一个挑战。许多低碳技术，包括风力涡轮机、电动汽车和催化转换器，都需要贵金属或其他金属，其数量空前，威胁到它们在中期的持续可用性。这些元素分散在我们的环境中，使它们成本高昂，难以回收。这强调了一种新的金属捕获和利用方法的必要性，从而增加了我们储备的寿命。我们为实现这一愿景提出了新的方向。初步研究表明，植物能够将铂族金属（PGM）矿化，形成稳定的金属纳米颗粒，这些纳米颗粒在各种重要的工业反应中都很活跃。我们打算利用矿山尾矿或采矿废水通过植物床进行金属吸附。由此产生的植物将受到受控热解，以产生具有稳定的PGM纳米颗粒的材料，用作多相催化剂。这为金属耗竭的国际问题提供了一个有效的解决方案，并将导致开发一系列新的天然衍生催化剂。项目合作者包括一个多学科小组，其中包括下列基本专门知识：不列颠哥伦比亚大学矿物、金属和材料环境研究中心（CERM3），该中心将收集关于全球PGM矿体分布的信息，提供矿山尾矿/水样和成分分析。约克大学（uy）的绿色化学卓越中心（GCC）和新型农产品中心（CNAP）将对催化剂的植物生长、表征和应用进行研究。最后，耶鲁大学林业与环境研究学院（Yale）将进行生命周期、经济和社会评估，以确定该项目将对更广泛的世界产生什么影响。

Climate change and peak oil crises have been making headlines with increasing intensity and solutions are being sought to lessen our dependence on oil. As new technologies tackle one challenge we are creating another through resource deficit. Many low carbon technologies including wind turbines, electric cars and catalytic converters require precious metals or other metals in unprecedented quantities threatening their continued availability in the middle term. These elements are being dispersed throughout our environment, making them costly and difficult to recover. This emphasises the necessity for a new approach to metal capture and use, thus increasing the lifetime of our reserves. We suggest a new direction for turning this vision into reality.Initial studies indicate that plants are capable of phytomining platinum group metals (PGM) to form stable metal nanoparticles that are active in a variety of industrially important reactions. We intend to utilise mine tailings or waste mining waters to pass through plant beds for metal adsorption. The resulting plants will be subjected to controlled pyrolysis to yield a material with stabilised nanoparticles of PGM for use as heterogeneous catalysts. This offers an effective solution to an international problem of metal depletion and will lead to the development of a new range of naturally derived catalysts.Project collaborators consist of a multidisciplinary team that incorporate the following essential expertise: The Centre for Environmental Research in Minerals, Metals and Materials (CERM3) at The University of British Columbia (UBC), who will gather information on worldwide distributions of PGM ore bodies, provide mine tailing/water samples and compositional analysis. The Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence (GCC) and Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP) at the University of York (UoY) will carry out the research into the plant growth, characterization and application of the catalysts. Finally, the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (Yale) will carry out life cycle, economical and societal assessment to determine what impact the project will have on the wider world.