Bioweg and TU Berlin win grant for bio-based REE recovery

Bioweg and Technische Universität Berlin secured €1.5 million from SPRIND to develop a water-based platform for recovering rare earth elements.

The three-year Stage 1 award under the Tech Metal Transformation Challenge will fund a system that couples Bioweg’s fermentation-derived bioacids for bioleaching with TU Berlin’s peptide-based column separations to isolate individual REEs.

The process operates in aqueous media at ambient temperature, avoids organic solvents and high heat, and leverages bioacids generated as a secondary output of existing fermentation streams—minimizing additional downstream processing, energy use and CO₂ emissions. The team aims to deliver higher-purity outputs suitable for direct downstream use as functional materials.

Conventional recovery methods are energy-intensive, nonselective and solvent-reliant; this approach targets a circular, low-energy alternative for Europe amid growing demand from electric vehicles, wind power and electronics. Bioweg contributes scaled fermentation and demonstration facilities, while TU Berlin, led by Prof. Juri Rappsilber and linked to the UniSysCat Cluster, supplies peptide-separation expertise. The partnership will validate an end-to-end route to recover and refine REEs from complex waste streams for industrial reuse.