Two Colleges Establish Metals Recycling Research Center

The Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), located in Worcester, Mass., and the Colorado School of Mines have jointly received a $400,000 award from the National Science Foundation to establish a research center that targets metals recycling.

The two colleges will create the Center for Resource Recovery and Recycling (CR3), which, the two colleges say, is the first research center dedicated to developing new technologies for maximizing the recovery and recycling of metals used in manufactured products and structures.

The award will help fund the cost of establishing the center and recruiting corporate members. The possible members could include scrap yards, municipal waste centers, shredding companies, smelters, foundries and manufacturers.

According to Diran Apelian, Howmet professor of Mechanical Engineering at WPI and director of its Metal Processing Institute, the center will seek between 30 and 40 members, each initially paying $30,000 per year, bringing the potential funding for the center to more than $6 million over the course of the grant. Apelian will serve as the center's director and WPI will be the lead institution.

Brajendra Mishra, professor and associate director of the Advanced Coatings and Surface Engineering Laboratory and the Kroll Institute for Extractive Metallurgy at Colorado School of Mines, will serve as associate director.

"Despite growing efforts to recycle metals, we still fail to recover half of the post-consumer metal scrap generated in this country; we rely on primary metals--those derived directly from ores--to fulfill two-thirds of our manufacturing needs," Apelian says. "The environmental benefits of reusing scrap instead of smelting primary metal are tremendous."

Faculty and students associated with CR3 will collaborate with industry partners to conduct research leading to advances in recycling and recovery technology that maximize the capture and reuse of post-consumer scrap and minimize the production of manufacturing scrap. These include sensors, controls, and sorting technologies that can identify valuable metals and separate them from the waste stream, as well as new alloys that are easier to recycle.

WPI will focus its research on metals used in structural applications, such as steel used in buildings and aluminum forged for automotive components. The Colorado School of Mines will focus its energies on metals used in what it calls functional applications, including high-value and rare-earth metals used in computers, electronics and photovoltaics.

"Our nation's economic health is intimately intertwined with our ability to conserve natural resources, including inorganic materials, which are not renewable," says Apelian. "The issue of sustainability should be paramount in how we design, manufacture, use, and retire the many products we use. That is the motivation for this new center's research and its partnership with industry."

Members of CR3 will help determine the direction of and benefit from the center's research, and will have royalty-free rights to intellectual property resulting from that research. Board members also will have the option of sponsoring supplementary research projects for additional fees. Members will have representation on the center’s Industrial Advisory Board, which will meet twice a year.