RPOD: Recycling at the Point of Disposal

The Recycling at the Point of Disposal (RPOD) Disruption Opportunity (DO) will evaluate the technical feasibility to recover (separate and coextract) multiple low-volume fraction critical elements present in end-of-life electronic hardware (e-waste).

Separation is defined as the extraction of various elements sequentially, and coextraction is defined as the extraction of a specified list of elements simultaneously from a feedstock containing a mixture of elements with other constituents.

Contemporary approaches such as pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy for recovering critical elements from e-waste are best suited to recover a large volume fraction component from the feedstock and are ill-suited to recover multiple low-volume fraction elements typically found in e-waste. While it is theoretically possible to exploit a combination of physical, chemical, and functional properties for fractional recovery of critical elements, such approaches are limited by insufficient knowledge on chemistries that can work together at the point of disposal.

DARPA’s Recycling at the Point of Disposal (RPOD) program aims to

• develop novel extraction chemistries and explore practical limits of yield, extraction efficiency, and purity to recover a selective list of critical elements from commercial and DoD e-waste, and
• demonstrate the technology in a benchtop hardware prototype.

If successful, the recovered stream from e-waste can minimize supply chain disruptions of critical elements sourced or processed abroad that are essential for high performance DoD hardware.